Harmful to health and driver of climate change: Excessive consumption of meat definitely has disadvantages. But many meat eaters find it difficult – despite ever-improving meat alternatives – to avoid the burger with the well-grilled meat patty, for example. A team of researchers from the University of Durham’s psychology department tested how consumers can still be persuaded to decide against a meat dish. They developed warning images, such as those commonly found on cigarette packs, and added them to various dishes. As a result, the test subjects were seven to ten percent less likely to choose a meal containing meat.
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For their study, which appeared in the journal “Appetite”, the research team of Jack Hughes, Milica Vasiljevic and Mario Weick developed three different versions of warning signs. The labels consisted of a short text and an image. The text was simple: meat consumption is bad for your health, meat consumption contributes to climate change and meat consumption promotes pandemics. The health label shows an unconscious man being resuscitated. The image for the climate warning shows a dead forest landscape and a factory in the background. The pandemic warning shows wild animals in small cages.
(Image: Hughes, Weick, Vasiljevic)
The 1,000 subjects who described themselves as meat eaters were randomly divided into four groups, with one serving as a control group.
Which dish should it be?
Each participant was shown 20 pictures of meals that might be available to choose from in a cafeteria. These include burgers, chili, curry, omelettes, pasta casseroles, sausages with mashed potatoes and pizza. The test person could choose between four variants for each dish: Would he or she choose a burger with meat, with fish, a vegetarian burger or a vegan burger? One test group saw the meat variant with a climate warning, the next group saw the health warning on the meat dish and the third group got the pandemic warning on the meat meal. The control group saw pictures of the dishes without any reference. If the test subjects had previously seen a warning in the picture, the tendency to choose a meat version of the dish decreased. It didn’t matter what kind of clue they saw. “All showed an effect compared to the control group, who saw no warning at all,” says Hughes.
He and his two colleagues were also interested in which variant of the warning notices the test subjects found most frightening and convincing. It turned out that the climate information received the most attention and was also considered the most credible.
“I already knew that graphic warnings were an effective tool that had helped reduce the number of smokers in the UK. The aim of the study was to find out whether their effectiveness could be applied to other products,” said Hughes. And the result shows that such labels are effective. Hughes sees the cheap and non-invasive warnings as an easy way to get closer to the British goal of reducing milk and meat consumption by 20 percent by 2030.
(jl)
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