Optimizing Messaging to Reduce Red Meat Consumption

ABSTRACT

Red meat production has a range of negative environmental impacts. We sought to characterize the motivations, environmental attitudes and demographics of red meat-eaters, and examine the effect of message framing in reducing future meat consumption. Canadian adult meat-eaters (593) completed a survey and were randomly assigned to one of six message treatments that presented information on the environmental impacts of meat production using frames representing social norms and/or place identity constructs. Taste and quality were the most important motivators for eating meat, while moral/ethical factors were the least. Forty-nine percent of respondents indicated they would reduce red meat intake after exposure to an information only message, while the social norms frame was more effective than others (χ2). Awareness of the environmental effects increased significantly after messaging for all 13 impacts. These findings should assist communicators with designing more effective messaging aimed at encouraging pro-environmental behaviours associated with meat consumption.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental impacts
• messaging
• framing
• behavioural intentions
• meat consumption
• climate change

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank Dr Danuta De Groisbois, Brock University, for her advice and support, Hannah Pickering and Jamie-Lee Robb for their valuable technical and editorial contributions, and Samantha Morris for her assistance. Finally, thank you to the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions greatly improved the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Council for Research in the Social Sciences and the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre, Brock University.