Psychosocial strategies to support sustainable eating

Current levels of meat consumption are unsustainable and insect-based foods are an alternative source of protein. However, European citizens often reject these foods. Automatic disgust responses are the most important reason for aversion to such products, while interest and curiosity increase the tendency to entomophagy. Previous attempts to overcome this resistance have mainly relied on persuasive communication and have produced mixed results.
Social learning methods such as vicarious approach-avoidance (Zogmaister et al., 2023) and other cognitive strategies such as the activation of relevant identities (Zhu et al., 2015) can be effective in influencing automatic attitudes towards food: they have therefore the potential for being used in communication campaigns to stimulate consumer interest, intentions and behaviour towards insect-based foods while reducing spontaneous aversion and disgust responses. However, such strategies have never been applied to insect-based foods.

• Adaptation of existing measures of automatic cognition for the measurement of spontaneous reactions to food and test of their psychometric properties.
• Development and experimental testing of communication strategies based on identity activation: their impact will be investigated on both self-reported and automatic cognitive responses to insect-based food.
• Development and experimental testing of communication strategies based on social learning: their impact will be investigated on both self-reported and automatic cognitive responses to insect-based food.
• Fine-tuning of the most promising strategy from the steps above and testing its effectiveness after a time interval.

The main goals of the project are:

• finding out promising strategies, that could be used in communication to create better spontaneous cognitive reactions to insect-based foods, hence sustaining the consumption of such foods;
• fine-tuning at least one of such strategies to better understand the critical aspects for its effectiveness.