Getting the message across: flexitarians as messengers for meat reduction

ABSTRACT

Despite a consensus among climate scientists on the impact of meat consumption on climate change, this has not yet had a significant impact on dietary attitudes and behavior in the broader public. Recent efforts to address this have focused on reduction of meat consumption (e.g., flexitarianism, reducetarianism) rather than elimination of meat consumption. This reduction-rather-than-elimination approach may have positive effects on how far messages about meat consumption will spread in a social network, reaching more people with therefore a potentially greater impact. To better understand the potential impact of such message, three studies compared reduction versus vegetarian messages that were provided by a person who reduces their meat consumption versus a vegetarian. Overall, reduction focused messages and messengers result in greater acceptance of the message and higher willingness to share the message with others compared to a strictly vegetarian message/messenger.

KEYWORDS:

• Meat
• climate change
• flexitarian
• vegetarian
• messaging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/z4xm2.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/z4xm2.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2136059

Notes

1. These analyses have also been run without covariates as one-way ANOVAs and Kruskal-Wallis tests to explore if the removal of covariates affecting these findings. Some findings do not retain statistical significance when analyzed this way. See Supplemental Findings for full analysis.

2. In Studies 2 and 3 we counterbalanced the order in which participants were presented with the control measures and the article and outcome measures. The pattern of significance remains the same when accounting for this counterbalancing, so it is not included in these analyses.

3. In Studies 2 and 3 participants were asked several additional questions about how they believed others would react if they shared the message, to explore potential reasons behind the message sharing effect (e.g., “If I share this message, those in my social network/social circle will view me as being overly political”). There were only two significant effects by condition across these measures across both studies. All measures and findings are reported in the supplemental materials.

4. In this study there was a difference between conditions on meat attachment (F(2,924) = 2.78, p = .06, with those in the vegetarian condition having lower meat attachment compared to the mixed condition (p = .03) and the reducetarian condition (p = .052). This did not differ by presentation order.

5. This difference in findings raises the idea that identity of the messenger may matter for NGOs but not individuals. To test this, we combined the datasets to test if message source (interpersonal in Studies 1 and 2 versus NGO in Study 3) interacted with condition. We found no evidence of an interaction effect. See Supplemental Findings for full results.

6. Due to their similar design, we also combined these datasets to examine the effect of this manipulation across all studies. In this combined dataset, across all outcomes, the vegetarian condition was significantly lower than the reducetarian condition (except for anticipated judgment in which the vegetarian condition was higher). The mixed condition was between the vegetarian and reducetarian condition on almost every score, though patterns of significant comparisons differed between outcomes and the exclusion of covariates. See Supplemental Findings for full results.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Joel Ginn

Joel Ginn is a Ph.D. student in the social psychology and peace and violence program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research interests focus on identity and how it relates to activism and social change. Joel is particularly focused on how identification as an environmentalist and dietary identities such as vegetarian may relate to sustainable behavior change.

Brian Lickel

Brian Lickel is a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research examines intergroup relations, emotions, and social cognition in relation to responses to societal threats, including climate change.