Affective and reflective attitudes toward vegetarian food consumption: The effect of imagery

The study's main goal was to investigate the effect of imagery on explicit and implicit attitudes toward vegetarian food consumption, as relevant psychological precursors of sustainable behavior in context of dual-process models.

163 participants completed an explicit rating task and an implicit association test (IAT), respectively, at pre and post-intervention, namely a five-minute imagery task about vegetarian nutrition.

The results showed, apart from explorative analyses, no significant time*group interaction effects on implicit attitudes, contrary to our initial expectation. There were no group differences in explicit attitudes toward vegetarian nutrition. Still, explicit attitudes toward meat-based nutrition got significantly worse in the intervention group than in the control group, which aligns with our initial expectations. Furthermore, eating habits moderated the effect between group and implicit attitudes significantly.

This study does not provide the full extent of the expected effect of imagery on altering explicit and implicit attitudes toward sustainable behavior, particularly vegetarian nutrition. Nevertheless, it shows promising imagery approaches as a short-term intervention promoting food-related attitudes as precursors of sustainable behavior in terms of stabilizing high implicit attitudes toward vegetarian nutrition and weakening explicit attitudes toward meat-based nutrition.