A comparison of explicit and implicit attitudes towards crop protection methods in Costa Rica and Germany

Figures & data

Table 1. Wordlist for the SC-IATs (translated to English)

		Wordlist
Attributes	Negative		Bad, brutal, disaster, disgusting, dreadful, painful, tragic, ugly
	Positive		Beautiful, celebration, joy, laugh, love, luck, outstanding, paradise
Concepts	Chemical crop protection		Fungicide, glyphosate, herbicide, insecticide, sprayer
	GM crop protection		Agro-genetic engineering, gene transfer, genetic modification, genetically modified organism, green genetic engineering

Source: Own depiction based on Römer et al. (2019)

Figure 1. Exemplary visualization of the key assignment on the screen during the SC-IAT (chemical crop protection at the top and GM crop protection at the bottom)^a.

^a The size representation is not true to scale. ^b Example of the concepts “fungicide”, “agro-genetic engineering” and “bad” are shown; for the complete overview of concepts please see (Table 1). Source: own depiction based on Römer et al. (2019)

Table 2. Procedure of the SC-IATs

Sequence^a	Block^a	Total Trials^a	F-Key (Trials)	J-Key (Trials)
1	1	72	Positive terms (5∙4 = 20) + chemical crop protection (5∙4 = 20)	Negative terms (8∙4 = 32)
	2	72	Positive terms (8∙4 = 32)	Negative terms (5∙4 = 20) + chemical crop protection (5∙4 = 20)
2	1	72	Positive terms (5∙4 = 20) + GM crop protection (5∙4 = 20)	Negative terms (8∙4 = 32)
	2	72	Positive terms (8∙4 = 32)	Negative terms (5∙4 = 20) + GM crop protection (5∙4 = 20)

^aThe order is determined randomly, Source: Modified after Römer et al. (2019).

Table 3. Descriptive statistics of Costa Rican and German students (N = 441)

		Mean/ Percentage
Variable	Description	Costa Rica	Germany
Age	Age of the participant in years	21.36 (0.36)	22.53 (0.23)
Apprenticeship	Participant completed an agricultural apprenticeship	17.31%	29.18%
Enrolled: Bachelor  Licentiate  Master  Other	Participant is a bachelor student Participant is a licentiate student Participant is a master student Participant is neither a bachelor nor a master student	27.40% 36.06% 28.37% 8.17%	66.95%- 30.04% 3.00%
Evaluation of study	Personal evaluation of our online study on a five-level Likert-item. Range from −2 (very poor) to +2 (very good)	1.35 (0.05)	0.99 (0.06)
Farm successor	Participant is a farm successor	13.46%	43.35%
Gender	Share of female participants	46.63%	45.92%
Purchasing organic products	Frequency of purchasing organic products on a five-level Likert-item. Range from −2 (very rare) to +2 (very often)	−0.10 (0.09)	−0.94 (0.08)
Response time	Response time of participants in milliseconds, excluding errors	951.04 (690.38)	926.62 (698.10)
Rural origin	Participant grew up in a rural region	57.21%	81.55%
Semester	Number of semesters enrolled	4.33 (0.17)	4.20 (0.38)
Number of observations		208	233

For all means, standard deviation in parentheses.

Figure 2. Distributions of the explicit and implicit associations (N = 441).

Source: Own depiction; Notes: CP = Chemical crop protection, GP = GM crop protection

Table 5. Mean and 95% confidence interval of the mean for the SC-IATs and Likert-items towards chemical and GM crop protection (N = 441)

	Costa Rica		Germany
	95% confidence interval	Mean	95% confidence interval	Mean
Chemical crop protection
Explicit:	−0.31; −0.02	−0.17	0.45; 0.70	0.57
Implicit:	−0.35; −0.15	−0.25	−0.37; −0.18	−0.28
GM crop protection
Explicit:	0.84; 1.11	0.98	0.27; 0.54	0.40
Implicit:	−0.04; 0.18	0.07	−0.21; −0.03	−0.12
Number of observations	208		233

Table 6. Correlation analysis Costa Rican sample (n = 208)

	Chemical crop protection: explicit	Chemical crop protection: implicit	GM crop protection: explicit	GM crop protection: implicit
Chemical crop protection: explicit	1.00
Chemical crop protection: implicit	0.05	1.00
GM crop protection: explicit	0.29*	−0.06	1.00
GM crop protection: implicit	−0.04	0.02	0.00	1.00

Pearson’s correlation coefficient; * indicates a significance level of 1%, after applying the Holm–Bonferroni correction. Bold figures highlight the explicit-implicit correlation for each crop protection method.

Table 7. Correlation analysis German sample (n = 233)

	Chemical crop protection: explicit	Chemical crop protection: implicit	GM crop protection: explicit	GM crop protection: implicit
Chemical crop protection: explicit	1.00
Chemical crop protection: implicit	0.32*	1.00
GM crop protection: explicit	0.45*	0.13	1.00
GM crop protection: implicit	0.07	0.02	0.12	1.00

Pearson’s correlation coefficient; *indicates a significance level of 1%, after applying the Holm–Bonferroni correction. Bold figures highlight the explicit–implicit correlation for each crop protection method.

Table 8. Seemingly unrelated regressions: Results for chemical and GM crop protection (N = 441)

Independent Variables	Chemical crop protection: explicit	Chemical crop protection: implicit	GM crop protection: explicit	GM crop protection: implicit
Country: Germany	0.103 (0.098)	−0.119 (0.080)	−0.680*** (0.108)	−0.218** (0.080)
Age	−0.026** (0.010)	0.002 (0.008)	0.009 (0.011)	0.001 (0.008)
Apprenticeship	0.182 (0.110)	0.043 (0.090)	−0.006 (0.121)	0.037 (0.090)
Farm successor	0.218 (0.108)	0.203* (0.088)	−0.023 (0.119)	−0.163 (0.089)
Frequency of purchasing organic products	−0.260*** (0.037)	−0.029 (0.030)	−0.102** (0.040)	−0.053* (0.030)
Gender female	−0.183 (0.090)	−0.116 (0.074)	−0.202 (0.099)	0.027 (0.074)
Rural region	0.092 (0.105)	0.001 (0.086)	0.067 (0.116)	0.073 (0.086)
Constant	0.680** (0.236)	−0.281 (0.193)	0.829*** (0.260)	0.010 (0.193)
R^2	0.203	0.029	0.103	0.032

*, **,*** indicate a significance level at 10%, 5%, and 1% respectively, after applying the Holm–Bonferroni correction. For all coefficients standard errors in parentheses. A variance-inflation-factor test indicates that multicollinearity is low with a maximum value of 1.26 for farm successor.

Römer, U., Schaak, H., & Mußhoff, O. (2019). The perception of crop protection: Explicit vs. implicit association of the public and in agriculture. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 66, 101346. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2019.101346

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