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Bringing Our Values to the Table: Political Ideology, Food Waste, and Overconsumption
... Recent literature suggests that conservatives are less likely to reduce food waste (Mas et al., 2022), and demonstrate less preference for sustainability labels (Gohary et al., 2023;Lin & Nayga, 2022). While there are observable differences in attitudes toward food safety across the political spectrum (Lusk, 2012), opinions converge regarding organic and local food (Biedny et al., 2020). ...
... Conservatives further demonstrate higher levels of gluten avoidance (Malone & Bailey Norwood, 2020). In terms of food waste, Mas, Haws, and Goldsmith (2022) find that liberals are more inclined to reduce food waste. Concerning food policies, conservatives generally favor fewer regulations and place less emphasis on food safety, quality, and health (Lusk, 2012), while liberals tend to support animal welfare legislation (Bovay & Sumner, 2019). ...
... Consequently, it can be effectively utilized as a segmentation variable in marketing and policy efforts. Besides, differences in political ideology manifest in varying preferences and attitudes towards food labels (e.g., fair trade or non-GMO), food-related attitudes (e.g., convenience, safety), and behavioral intentions (Gohary et al., 2023;Lusk, 2012;Mas et al., 2022;Witzling & Shaw, 2019). ...
We investigate the associations between political ideology and heterogeneous consumer preferences for food
values. Marketing literature emphasizes the polarizing role of political ideology in consumer preferences. Despite
the growing recognition of this relationship, scarce evidence exists regarding food value preferences across the
political spectrum. Using survey data from 637 respondents, our findings reveal that conservatism relates to
heterogeneous consumer preferences for food values. Specifically, conservatism is positively associated with
naturalness and tradition, and negatively with environmental impact. These results underscore the potential of
political ideology as a predictor of food preferences, suggesting its potential application in developing targeted
marketing programs and policy interventions. Accordingly, marketing and policy communications should be
tailored to align with the intended audience’s political ideology. Managerial implications further expand to the
promotion of ethical and sustainable food products, the introduction of innovative food technologies, and the
adoption of sustainable supply chains.
... For example, how does grittiness differ between liberal and conservative consumers? Is the conservative notion of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps (Jarrell, 2011) or displaying greater personal responsibility (Mas et al., 2022) synonymous with the underlying principles of grit? Might these gritty differences between liberals and conservatives influence downstream moral consumer choices? ...
... Moreover, a conservative focus on personal responsibility (i.e., maintaining accountability; Farmer et al., 2021;Mas et al., 2022) highlights important similarities between conservatism and grit. ...
Grit—passion and perseverance toward long‐term goals—is generally associated with conscientiousness and consistency and thus presumed to be ideologically conservative in nature. Yet, an understanding of how liberals and conservatives differ in grittiness remains elusive. In this research, overall grit did not differ between liberals and conservatives, rather ideology played an essential role in driving which dimension of grit (perseverance; passion) was emphasized. Contrary to conventional wisdom, grit‐based perseverance (passion) was more influential to liberals (conservatives). Across two studies and a pilot study (appendix), the authors find that while ideology had no direct influence on moral consumer choices, grit‐based perseverance (passion), related to consumers' liberal (conservative) ideology, significantly increased (decreased) intentions to make moral consumer choices. These findings delineate the relationship between political ideology and grit, and the impact on moral consumer choices. The current research offers important implications for practitioners as well as numerous avenues for future research.
... This is an important omission that may have occurred due to a focus in the papers reviewed on 'sustainable consumption' as opposed to 'sustainability through consuming less'. The interested reader may note that the imperative to 'consume less' has been discussed in marketing literature on over-consumption -for example, in the context of ethical marketing (e.g., Ardley & May, 2020), value beliefs (Mas et al., 2022), and consumer goal-setting and managing conflicting information (Bareket-Bojmel et al., 2020). ...
In developed countries, sustainability is increasingly an active agenda topic for businesses. Yet a view on what sustainability exactly means in the minds of consumers is missing. In response to this research opportunity, online panel respondents from seven advanced economies (France, UK, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, N = 5620) were surveyed in two cross-sectional waves. Factor analytical results show that consumers associate sustainability with three key subdimensions: ‘social equality’ (e.g., fair wages), ‘circularity’ (e.g., recycling) and ‘naturalness’ (e.g., avoiding use of pesticides and GMOs). This observation offers inspiration to update the traditional two-dimensional (social vs. environmental) structure of sustainability advanced in previous literature. In addition, the identified ‘naturalness’ dimension may point to a new route to stimulate pro-environmental behavior as it has both a strong link with the environment and may introduce an affective undertone. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications, and report observed country, gender, and age differences.
... Furthermore, conservatives and liberals respond differently when faced with the trade-off between overconsumption and food waste. When food portions are large and food waste becomes likely, compared to liberals who are more concerned about environmental consequences of waste and thus overconsume to prevent waste, conservatives are more concerned about personal responsibility and thus waste food to reduce overconsumption (Mas et al., 2022). ...
... At the same time, we acknowledge limitations in our work that could motivate future research. First, while few would disagree that reducing household food waste is a worthy cause, reducing it at the expense of adding consumption is debatable-especially if extra eating carries consequences for one's health (Mas, Haws, and Goldsmith 2022). Most definitions of food waste, including the one endorsed by the UN that we adopted, do not include overnutrition as an instance of waste (Parfitt et al. 2010). ...
Retailer price promotions, and in particular multi-unit deals such as the ubiquitous “buy one, get one,” are often criticized as a cause of food waste, presumably because they lure households into buying more than they can realistically consume. In this research, the authors combine field data and experiments to provide the first systematic test of this claim. The field data, which span eight frequently purchased perishable foods, show no evidence of a positive relationship between single-unit or multi-unit price promotions and food waste. In fact, households that took advantage of a multi-unit deal reported wasting less than did households paying regular prices (RPs), but only when the quantity purchased was larger than usual. Given this result, and that households also reported consuming and freezing more, the authors hypothesize that promotion-induced overbuying triggers a concern for food waste that encourages waste prevention. One experiment finds support for this mechanism. A second experiment shows that the effect on food waste concerns is moderated by perishability and versatility but unaffected by convenience and healthiness. Overall, then, this research invites regulators and other professionals to rethink their stance on price promotions and work with retailers to design smart campaigns that motivate waste awareness and management.
Consumer food waste, with its extensive social, economic, and environmental implications, gained heightened attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted food supply chains and exacerbated food insecurity. Amidst conflicting reports on the pandemic’s influences on consumer-level food waste, this research differentiates between the infection and lockdown facets of a pandemic. Specifically, we demonstrate that infection salience amplifies safety-health concerns, leading to increased consumer food waste, while lockdown salience raises concerns over resource scarcity, resulting in reduced consumer food waste. Considering most pandemics or infectious diseases primarily increase infection salience without inducing lockdowns, we propose a safety-health intervention to mitigate the rise in consumer food waste driven by infection salience and the associated safety-health concerns. Through a large-scale field study, a lab experiment measuring real food waste, a country-level secondary dataset, and three supplementary experiments, we provide converging supports for our theory. These studies also showcase various implementations of the safety-health intervention, such as table tents, napkins, and to-go boxes. This research reconciles divergent perspectives on the pandemic’s impact on consumer-level food waste, enriches the understanding of pandemics and associated food waste dynamics, and offers actionable strategies for businesses and policymakers to address consumer food waste during pandemics.
Curiosity is a powerful motivator of behaviour. Although there have been some studies pertaining to the application of curiosity in the realm of food, research examining the potential to influence consumer food waste behaviour through the induction of curiosity is lacking. This study conducted two onsite dining experiments to explore the role and mechanism of curiosity in reducing food waste in a real dining environment by utilising an information gap design in tableware to induce participants’ curiosity. Experiment 1 investigated the differences in food waste between participants using bowls with an information gap design and those using bowls with no information gap (blank bowls). Experiment 2 further controlled for other variables that could potentially influence the outcomes between bowls with and without information gaps; the latter displayed complete text externally. The results of both experiments consistently demonstrated a significant reduction in participants’ food waste when utilising utensils with an information gap design. Moreover, we conducted an exploratory analysis combining these two experiments to examine the mediating mechanisms involved. Furthermore, the exploratory analysis suggested the mediating mechanism of curiosity elicited by the information gap design, ultimately leading to a decrease in food waste. This study presents a potential avenue for a simple and innovative approach for mitigating food waste.
Objectives
To estimate the impact of county-level income, access to food, availability of health resources, socioeconomic factors, and state political ideology on population obesity and mental health in US counties.
Design
We compiled a county-level data set from the US Census, County Health Rankings, USDA Food Environment Atlas, the American Community Survey, and the State Ideology Database. We specify 2 multivariable regression models for county-level obesity rate and per capita poor mental health days and control for rurality, food access, income, availability of health care resources, state political ideology, and socioeconomic characteristics.
Results
We find that higher food access reduces obesity in counties; an increase in per capita full-service restaurants by 1 unit is associated with reduction in obesity rate by 1.24 points and an increase in per capita grocery stores reduces poor mental health days by 0.14. We also find that counties in liberal-leaning states tend to have lower obesity rates. Access to primary care providers (increase in primary care physicians by 1 is associated with decline in obesity rate by 1.18 points and poor mental health days by 0.11 days), and recreational facilities (increase in recreational facilities per 1000 by 1 is associated with reduction in obesity rate by 3.16 points and poor mental health days by 0.47 days) reduces obesity rates and poor mental health days. Median income is associated with decrease in obesity rate and poor mental health days. Increase in median household income by 1% is associated with reduction in obesity rate 4.75% and reduction in poor mental health days by 1.39 days.
Conclusions
We find that access to food and health care at county level and state ideology through policy making affects health outcomes. Our analysis indicates that counties can improve access to food and health care by investing in these services thereby improving county-level health outcomes and save dollars in the process.
Given its multi‐faceted nature, consumer research has evinced interest from scholars both within and outside the marketing domain, resulting in ongoing knowledge contributions from a diverse range of disciplines. We conduct a comprehensive review and comparison across both marketing (“inside”) and non‐marketing (“outside”) disciplines to identify which topics are most and least focused on within each disciplinary domain and which are emerging as the most impactful. We also identify which of the marketing (FT50) journals are at the forefront of cutting‐edge research and demonstrate their contributions to the progression of the most impactful topics in the field. Based on our findings, we identify key gaps and under‐researched areas of substantive interest, highlight impactful emerging topics in non‐marketing journals where marketing could offer unique perspectives, and provide concrete suggestions and directions to further progress and stimulate consumer research.
This article is part of the issue “Consumer Psychology for the Greater Good”
The authors examine political ideology as it influences how people distribute their donations across multiple charities. Findings from five studies indicate that liberals and conservatives donate similar overall amounts of money, however, liberals tend to give to a greater number of charities, people, and causes overall while giving less to each (breadth). Conservatives tend to donate to fewer charities, people, and causes overall while giving more to each (depth). Using the Model of Moral Motives, conservatives’ endorsement of social order led to their focus on smaller groups and protecting members of these groups as they give with depth. In contrast, liberals’ endorsement of social justice led to their focus on eliminating broad inequality as they give with breadth. However, these ideological tendencies can be reversed as conservatives gave with breadth when protecting social order and liberals gave with depth when equality was restored.
For nearly a century social scientists have sought to understand left-right ideological differences in values, motives, and thinking styles. Much progress has been made, but-as in other areas of research-this work has been criticized for relying on small and statistically unrepresentative samples and the use of reactive, self-report measures that lack ecological validity. In an effort to overcome these limitations, we employed automated text analytic methods to investigate the spontaneous, naturally occurring use of language in nearly 25,000 Twitter users. We derived 27 hypotheses from the literature on political psychology and tested them using 32 individual dictionaries. In 23 cases, we observed significant differences in the linguistic styles of liberals and conservatives. For instance, liberals used more language that conveyed benevolence, whereas conservatives used more language pertaining to threat, power, tradition, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, and negative emotion in general. In 17 cases, there were also significant effects of ideological extremity. For instance, moderates used more benevolent language, whereas extremists used more language pertaining to inhibition, tentativeness, affiliation, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, negative affect, swear words, and death-related language. These research methods, which are easily adaptable, open up new and unprecedented opportunities for conducting unobtrusive research in psycholinguistics and political psychology with large and diverse samples. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
Self‐control is a prominent topic in consumer research, where it is often conceptualized as the abstinence from hedonic consumption. We examine whether this conceptualization accurately captures consumers’ experiences of self‐control conflicts/failures in light of seminal self‐control theories in economics and psychology. Rejecting that notion, we argue that self‐control failures are choices in violation of superordinate long‐term goals accompanied by anticipated regret, rather than choices of hedonic over utilitarian consumption. This conceptualization has important methodological, theoretical, and practical implications. Methodologically, it highlights the need for experimental paradigms with higher construct validity. Theoretically, it helps elucidate how self‐control is distinct from impatience and self‐regulation. Practically, it provides a rich set of implications for deducing interventions on the individual and public policy level to help consumers exert self‐control.
Highlighting the important role of marketing in encouraging sustainable consumption, the current research presents a review of the academic literature from marketing and behavioral science that examines the most effective ways to shift consumer behaviors to be more sustainable. In the process of the review, the authors develop a comprehensive framework for conceptualizing and encouraging sustainable consumer behavior change. The framework is represented by the acronym SHIFT, and it proposes that consumers are more inclined to engage in pro-environmental behaviors when the message or context leverages the following psychological factors: Social influence, Habit formation, Individual self, Feelings and cognition, and Tangibility. The authors also identify five broad challenges to encouraging sustainable behaviors and use these to develop novel theoretical propositions and directions for future research. Finally, the authors outline how practitioners aiming to encourage sustainable consumer behaviors can use this framework.
As consumers’ political opinions become more divided and more central to their identities, it is important to understand how political ideology shapes consumers’ attempts to differentiate from others in the marketplace. Seven studies demonstrate that political ideology systematically influences consumers’ preferences for differentiation. Conservative ideology leads consumers to differentiate from others vertically in the social hierarchy through products that signal that they are better than others, and liberal ideology leads consumers to differentiate from others horizontally in the social hierarchy through products that signal that they are unique from others. This happens because conservatism endorses, and liberalism opposes, the belief that the dominance-based hierarchical social structure is a legitimate mechanism to distinguish individual qualities. The effect is robust across measured and manipulated ideology, hypothetical and real product choices, and online searches in conservative and liberal U.S. states. Manipulating consumers’ differentiation goals and perceptions of hierarchy legitimacy mitigates the effect. The findings advance existing research on political ideology, social hierarchy, and consumer divergence, and they contribute to marketing practice.
Antiobesity health communication campaigns often target individual behavior, but these ads might inflate the role of individual responsibility at the expense of other health determinants. In a 2 × 2 full-factorial, randomized, online experiment, 162 American adults viewed antiobesity advertisements that varied in emphasizing social or individual causation for obesity through text and images. Locus for attribution of responsibility for obesity causes and solutions was measured, as was how these responses were moderated by political ideology. Participants who viewed text emphasizing individual responsibility were less likely to agree that genetic factors caused obesity. Conservative participants who viewed images of overweight individuals were less likely than liberal participants to agree that social factors were responsible for causing obesity. In addition, among conservative participants who viewed images of fast food versus images of overweight individuals, agreement that the food industry bore some responsibility mediated support for policy solutions to obesity. These findings, among others, demonstrate that awareness of multilevel determinants of health outcomes can be a precursor of support for policy solutions to obesity among those not politically inclined to support antiobesity policy. In addition, stigmatizing images of overweight individuals in antiobesity campaigns might overemphasize the role of individual behavior in obesity at the expense of other factors.
Voters' political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the major coalitions in the Italian national election of 2001 showed that supporters of the two coalitions differed in traits and values, largely as hypothesized. Center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in the traits of friendliness and openness and lower in energy and conscientiousness. Regarding values, center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self-direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition. Logistic regressions revealed that values explained substantial variance in past and future voting and in change of political choice, trumping personality traits. We discuss explanations for the primacy of values and implications for the social cognitive view of personality.
Previous research has demonstrated a striking difference in climate change beliefs and policy support between people who identify with the right-wing of politics and with the left-wing of politics. But are we destined to continue with this divergence? We suggest that there is movement around these differences based on the politicization of climate change and we conducted two experimental studies with 126 and 646 people, respectively, to examine this effect. We found that those people whose political identity was made salient were less likely to believe in an anthropogenic cause of climate change and less likely to support government climate change policies than those whose identity was not made salient; particularly when those people were aligned with the right-wing of politics. The results demonstrate the importance of the salience of one's political identity in determining attitudes and beliefs even for scientific facts such as climate change. Our research also identifies some ways forward in dealing with climate change-based on depoliticizing the issue.
The authors develop a conceptual model of how the congruence of political ideology and persuasive appeals enhances sustainable behaviors. In study 1, persuasive appeals consistent with individualizing and binding moral foundations were developed to enhance liberal and conservative recycling. In study 2, individualizing and binding appeals were tested on actual recycling behavior using a longitudinal field study to demonstrate the effectiveness of messages congruent with the moral foundations of liberals and conservatives. Study 3 demonstrated that enhanced fluency represents the underlying psychological process that mediates the relationship between message congruence and intentions. Moreover, study 3 established that spillover effects resulting from increased intentions to engage in sustainable disposition behavior enhance intentions to engage in sustainable acquisition and consumption behaviors. Finally, study 4 ruled out potential message confounds to demonstrate the robustness of the findings. Practical implications for marketers and public policy officials interested in increasing sustainable behaviors are offered.
Marketers often offer consumers the option to “supersize” a food purchase intended for immediate consumption. Supersized products may be attractive to consumers from the standpoint of the unit pricing as ordering a larger size of the same product results in a per unit savings and offers consumers the opportunity to meet their value-based financial goals. In the current research, we show that such pricing strategies not only lead to greater purchase and consumption, they do so by impacting important consumer goals in unrelated domains, namely by decreasing the importance placed on health goals. While supersized pricing can have a powerful effect on purchase behavior, providing health cues can prevent the decreased focus on health. In addition, supersized pricing can be utilized to increase size choice of healthy foods. Contributions to theory are discussed, particularly for understanding decisions regarding that pursuit of multiple goals specifically at the intersection of health and financial goals. Additionally, both marketing and public policy implications are provided, including those for the growing obesity epidemic and frequent use of supersized pricing strategies for unhealthy foods.
Voters' political choices have presumably come to depend more on their personal preferences and less on their social characteristics in Western democracies. We examine two aspects of personality that may influence political choice, traits and personal values, using the Five Factor Model of personality traits and the Schwartz (1992) theory of basic personal values. Data from 3044 voters for the major coalitions in the Italian national election of 2001 showed that supporters of the two coalitions differed in traits and values, largely as hypothesized. Center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in the traits of friendliness and openness and lower in energy and conscientiousness. Regarding values, center-left voters were higher than center-right voters in universalism, benevolence, and self-direction and lower in security, power, achievement, conformity, and tradition. Logistic regressions revealed that values explained substantial variance in past and future voting and in change of political choice, trumping personality traits. We discuss explanations for the primacy of values and implications for the social cognitive view of personality.
In Study 1, politically liberal college students’ in-group favoritism increased after a system-injustice threat, becoming as pronounced as that of conservatives. Studies 2 and 3 conceptually replicated these results with low preference for consistency [Cialdini, R. B., Trost, M. R., & Newsom, J. T. (1995). Preference for consistency: The development of a valid measure and the discovery of surprising behavioral implications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 318–328.] as a dispositional measure of liberalism. In Study 2, following a mortality salience threat, dispositionally liberal students showed as much conviction in their attitudes toward capital punishment and abortion as dispositional conservatives did. In Study 3, after a mortality salience threat, liberal students became as staunchly unsupportive of homosexuals as conservatives were. The findings that political and dispositional liberals become more politically and psychologically conservative after threats provide convergent experimental support for the [Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129 339–375.] contention that conservatism is a basic form of motivated social cognition.
Policies that mandate calorie labeling in fast-food and chain restaurants have had little or no observable impact on calorie consumption to date. In three field experiments, we tested an alternative approach: activating consumers' self-control by having servers ask customers if they wanted to downsize portions of three starchy side dishes at a Chinese fast-food restaurant. We consistently found that 14-33 percent of customers accepted the downsizing offer, and they did so whether or not they were given a nominal twenty-five-cent discount. Overall, those who accepted smaller portions did not compensate by ordering more calories in their entrées, and the total calories served to them were, on average, reduced by more than 200. We also found that accepting the downsizing offer did not change the amount of uneaten food left at the end of the meal, so the calorie savings during purchasing translated into calorie savings during consumption. Labeling the calorie content of food during one of the experiments had no measurable impact on ordering behavior. If anything, the downsizing offer was less effective in changing customers' ordering patterns with the calorie labeling present. These findings highlight the potential importance of portion-control interventions that specifically activate consumers' self-control.
We explored the effect of attribute framing on choice, labeling charges for environmental costs as either an earmarked tax or an offset. Eight hundred ninety-eight Americans chose between otherwise identical products or services, where one option included a surcharge for emitted carbon dioxide. The cost framing changed preferences for self-identified Republicans and Independents, but did not affect Democrats' preferences. We explain this interaction by means of query theory and show that attribute framing can change the order in which internal queries supporting one or another option are posed. The effect of attribute labeling on query order is shown to depend on the representations of either taxes or offsets held by people with different political affiliations.
How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people's use of 5 sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity foundations compared to the other 3 foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed and used the 5 foundations more equally. This difference was observed in abstract assessments of the moral relevance of foundation-related concerns such as violence or loyalty (Study 1), moral judgments of statements and scenarios (Study 2), "sacredness" reactions to taboo trade-offs (Study 3), and use of foundation-related words in the moral texts of religious sermons (Study 4). These findings help to illuminate the nature and intractability of moral disagreements in the American "culture war."
Ideology has re-emerged as an important topic of inquiry among social, personality, and political psychologists. In this review, we examine recent theory and research concerning the structure, contents, and functions of ideological belief systems. We begin by defining the construct and placing it in historical and philosophical context. We then examine different perspectives on how many (and what types of) dimensions individuals use to organize their political opinions. We investigate (a) how and to what extent individuals acquire the discursive contents associated with various ideologies, and (b) the social-psychological functions that these ideologies serve for those who adopt them. Our review highlights "elective affinities" between situational and dispositional needs of individuals and groups and the structure and contents of specific ideologies. Finally, we consider the consequences of ideology, especially with respect to attitudes, evaluations, and processes of system justification.
Because larger food portions could be contributing to the increasing prevalence of overweight and obesity, this study was designed to weigh samples of marketplace foods, identify historical changes in the sizes of those foods, and compare current portions with federal standards.
We obtained information about current portions from manufacturers or from direct weighing; we obtained information about past portions from manufacturers or contemporary publications.
Marketplace food portions have increased in size and now exceed federal standards. Portion sizes began to grow in the 1970s, rose sharply in the 1980s, and have continued in parallel with increasing body weights.
Because energy content increases with portion size, educational and other public health efforts to address obesity should focus on the need for people to consume smaller portions.
The "end of ideology" was declared by social scientists in the aftermath of World War II. They argued that (a) ordinary citizens' political attitudes lack the kind of stability, consistency, and constraint that ideology requires; (b) ideological constructs such as liberalism and conservatism lack motivational potency and behavioral significance; (c) there are no major differences in content (or substance) between liberal and conservative points of view; and (d) there are few important differences in psychological processes (or styles) that underlie liberal versus conservative orientations. The end-of-ideologists were so influential that researchers ignored the topic of ideology for many years. However, current political realities, recent data from the American National Election Studies, and results from an emerging psychological paradigm provide strong grounds for returning to the study of ideology. Studies reveal that there are indeed meaningful political and psychological differences that covary with ideological self-placement. Situational variables--including system threat and mortality salience--and dispositional variables--including openness and conscientiousness--affect the degree to which an individual is drawn to liberal versus conservative leaders, parties, and opinions. A psychological analysis is also useful for understanding the political divide between "red states" and "blue states."
Excess health care costs for treatment of noncommunicable diseases caused by obesity are now $200 billion/year. In addition, obesity reduces workforce productivity, and increases risks for disability and accidents. The executive branch of government can potentially influence obesity through many mechanisms, including policies for health care, feeding assistance programs, dietary guidelines, industry subsidies or tax breaks for weight management programs, farm subsidies for different types of agricultural products, diet‐physical activity policies for government employees and the military, and funding for obesity research. Despite this powerful connection between national administrations and the likely ability of the U.S. to manage its obesity epidemic, little is known about the relationship between obesity and voting patterns. We examined the association of rates of obesity with voting patterns in the 2016 presidential election to explore the political ramifications of this challenging disease.
Data on rates of obesity across states and Washington D.C. were drawn from CDC data. Voting patterns in the 2016 election, the percent of the population in different racial/ethnic categories, and median income were taken from public records. There was a strong positive association between rate of obesity and percent of votes received by the Republican presidential candidate (Spearman's correlation coefficient=0.755, P<0.001), and a negative association of rate of obesity with percent of votes received by the Democrat presidential (Spearman's correlation coefficient=0.553, P<0.001). In regression models adding median income and percent ethnic minorities as covariates, percent of votes received by the Republican candidate remained a strong and highly significant predictor of percent obesity.
The underlying reasons for the robust association of obesity and republican voting, independent of income and ethnic minority populations, are not known. However, regional food consumption patterns, eating habits and lifestyle are likely to important, given the dominant role of these factors in the development and maintenance of obesity, as well as rates of educational attainment and rural versus urban environments.
These results confirm and extend associations of republication voting and rates of obesity documented in previous elections. Reducing health care costs and increasing employment were common agenda items during the 2016 presidential election. Even a 5–10% weight loss reduces health care costs and employee absenteeism within two years. By using a combination of executive actions and increased research funding, obesity reduction is likely to provide a quick return on investment that supports multiple political priorities.
We build a model of American presidential voting in which the cumulative impression left by political events determines the preferences of voters. The impression varies by voter, depending on their age at the time the events took place. We use the Gallup presidential approval‐rating time series to reflect the major events that influence voter preferences, with the most influential occurring during a voter's teenage and early adult years. Our fitted model is predictive, explaining more than 80% of the variation in voting trends over the last half‐century. It is also interpretable, dividing voters into five meaningful generations: New Deal Democrats, Eisenhower Republicans, 1960s Liberals, Reagan Conservatives, and Millennials. We present each generation in context of the political events that shaped its preferences, beginning in 1940 and ending with the 2016 election.
This research proposes the existence of a hitherto undocumented attitude related to food wastage: the attitude of food‐waste‐aversion. We develop a 6‐item scale including affective, cognitive, and conative components to measure this attitude, and empirically investigate its properties in two countries using novel datasets. We test for food‐waste‐aversion scale’s convergent validity by demonstrating that it is correlated in the expected direction with five theoretically‐related constructs—frugality, social responsibility, spendthriftness, self‐control, and materialism (Studies 1a and 1b)—and with BMI (Studies 2 and 3). We provide more indirect evidence of the scale’s convergent validity by documenting that the link between food‐waste‐aversion and BMI is attenuated among those who practice refrigerating leftovers (Study 3). We also document that the food‐waste‐aversion scale is distinct from general waste aversion and external meal‐cessation rules, thus providing evidence of discriminant validity (Studies 1a, 1b and 1c). Taken together, these results provide construct validity for the novel construct of food‐waste‐aversion. We discuss the theoretical and substantive contributions of our findings.
The inequality of wealth in the United States has reached record high levels in recent years. Although many people agree that the current level of inequality is extreme, public support for redistributive measures designed to reduce inequality is divided. Prior work predicts that perceiving high similarity can potentially boost individuals' support for redistribution. However, the present research proposes that the effect of social similarity on redistribution support may be more complex. Whereas high (vs. low) perceived social similarity increases support for redistribution among liberals, contrary to prior predictions, it may actually decrease redistribution support among conservatives. This happens because high (vs. low) perceived social similarity weakens liberals', but strengthens conservatives', beliefs that people deserve their unequal outcomes. The findings generate useful insights for researchers and policymakers by suggesting that strategies that aim to garner public support for redistribution by changing perceptions of social similarity should be tailored to the audience.
Rationale:
Although food companies increasingly refer to moral values, such as patriotism and social justice, in their marketing efforts, little is known about how appealing to consumers' political leanings may affect food perceptions.
Objectives:
Contributing to research on both consumer psychology and health risk communication, the current research addresses this issue and demonstrates how the use of incongruent political appeals decreases the effectiveness of food health claims.
Method and results:
Two experiments (N1 = 699; N2 = 702) conducted in the U.S. show that health claims framed with political appeals that do not match consumers' values (incongruent appeals) result in higher health risk perceptions by decreasing the feeling of fluency. When referring to patriotism and traditional values, health claims are less effective and result in higher health risk perceptions for liberals. Similarly, references to social justice and sense of community increase health risk perceptions for conservatives.
Conclusion:
While the factors influencing consumer response to health claims remain largely unclear, these results contribute to our understanding by providing evidence that appealing to individuals' moral foundations can affect the effectiveness of health claims.
Despite a scientific consensus, citizens are divided when it comes to climate change — often along political lines. Democrats or liberals tend to believe that human activity is a primary cause of climate change, whereas Republicans or conservatives are much less likely to hold this belief. A prominent explanation for this divide is that it stems from directional motivated reasoning: individuals reject new information that contradicts their standing beliefs. In this Review, we suggest that the empirical evidence is not so clear, and is equally consistent with a theory in which citizens strive to form accurate beliefs but vary in what they consider to be credible evidence. This suggests a new research agenda on climate change preference formation, and has implications for effective communication.
This research sought to better understand local food consumers and take steps to begin to identify how targeted messages could engage different groups. In order to accomplish these aims, data was collected through a survey mailed to a random sample of Wisconsin households with a final sample size of 577. These consumers were then segmented based on variables related to the food related lifestyle (FRL) and political ideology. Political ideology was included as it influences the media to which individuals pay attention, and how they interpret messages. Identified groups were further profiled with variables related to local food purchasing, frequency of shopping at farmers’ markets and natural food stores, willingness to pay a premium for local food, perceptions related to local food, communication habits, and demographics. Five segments were identified, with three standing out as likely consumers of local produce. The liberal, “Adventurous” consumers showed a strong interest in local food, perceiving local food to be superior for its environmental benefits, among other reasons. The “Traditional” and “Rational” groups were not interested in local food for environmental reasons, and may find such messages unappealing. In order to engage these other groups, messages should address the high quality of local food, how it can be incorporated into traditional recipes (for the “Traditional” group), and ways to make local food affordable and convenient to buy (for the “Rational” group).
This study identifies barriers and benefits of consumers’ current doggy bag behaviors and provides the information required to run an effective community-based social marketing campaign encouraging consumers to take their uneaten restaurant and café food home. This is done by applying a two-stage methodology, including quantitatively analyzing existing survey data and qualitatively investigating focus group discussion. Multiple barriers to widespread doggy bag participation were common and varied for different individuals and included both convenience and social stigma-related factors. The rational appeal of “saving money” was found to be the most effective motivator for encouraging doggy bag usage, especially for women, young people, students/unemployed, and low-income earners. Social marketing strategies and behavior change tools can be developed to remove the barriers and enhance the benefits of using doggy bags, such as developing positive social norms around using doggy bags and highlighting the financial incentive of using them. This research contributes to a limited but growing literature on out-of-home food waste and provides practicable insights for both public policy and for the food service sector for future initiatives aiming to reduce food waste.
Individuals are not merely passive vessels of whatever beliefs and opinions they have been exposed to; rather, they are attracted to belief systems that resonate with their own psychological needs and interests, including epistemic, existential, and relational needs to attain certainty, security, and social belongingness. Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway (2003) demonstrated that needs to manage uncertainty and threat were associated with core values of political conservatism, namely respect for tradition and acceptance of inequality. Since 2003 there have been far more studies on the psychology of left-right ideology than in the preceding half century, and their empirical yield helps to address lingering questions and criticisms. We have identified 181 studies of epistemic motivation (involving 130,000 individual participants) and nearly 100 studies of existential motivation (involving 360,000 participants). These databases, which are much larger and more heterogeneous than those used in previous meta-analyses, confirm that significant ideological asymmetries exist with respect to dogmatism, cognitive/perceptual rigidity, personal needs for order/structure/closure, integrative complexity, tolerance of ambiguity/uncertainty, need for cognition, cognitive reflection, self-deception, and subjective perceptions of threat. Exposure to objectively threatening circumstances—such as terrorist attacks, governmental warnings, and shifts in racial demography—contribute to modest “conservative shifts” in public opinion. There are also ideological asymmetries in relational motivation, including the desire to share reality, perceptions of within-group consensus, collective self-efficacy, homogeneity of social networks, and the tendency to trust the government more when one's own political party is in power. Although some object to the very notion that there are meaningful psychological differences between leftists and rightists, the identification of “elective affinities” between cognitive-motivational processes and contents of specific belief systems is essential to the study of political psychology. Political psychologists may contribute to the development of a good society not by downplaying ideological differences or advocating “Swiss-style neutrality” when it comes to human values, but by investigating such phenomena critically, even—or perhaps especially—when there is pressure in society to view them uncritically.
Food waste presents a complex global problem that involves multiple actors and institutions within the aggregate food marketing system. Food waste occurs across food production and distribution, as well as at the hands of the consumer. In this research, the authors focus on waste that occurs across what is termed the "squander sequence," which describes waste that occurs from consumer behaviors at the preacquisition, acquisition, consumption, and disposition stages. The authors set forth a behavioral theory-based agenda to explain food waste in the squander sequence with the ultimate goals of encouraging future research to uncover the psychological underpinnings of consumer-level food waste and of deriving transformative consumer solutions to this substantive issue.
Many restaurants are increasingly required to display calorie information on their menus. We present a study examining how consumers' food choices are affected by the presence of calorie information on restaurant menus. However, unlike prior research on this topic, we focus on the effect of calorie information on food choices made from a menu that contains both full size portions and half size portions of entrées. This different focus is important because many restaurants increasingly provide more than one portion size option per entrée. Additionally, we examine whether the impact of calorie information differs depending on whether full portions are cheaper per unit than half portions (non-linear pricing) or whether they have a similar per unit price (linear pricing). We find that when linear pricing is used, calorie information leads people to order fewer calories. This decrease occurs as people switch from unhealthy full sized portions to healthy full sized portions, not to unhealthy half sized portions. In contrast, when non-linear pricing is used, calorie information has no impact on calories selected. Considering the impact of calorie information on consumers' choices from menus with more than one entrée portion size option is increasingly important given restaurant and legislative trends, and the present research demonstrates that calorie information and pricing scheme may interact to affect choices from such menus.
Research on overeating assumes that pleasure must be sacrificed for the sake of good health. Contrary to this view, the authors show that focusing on sensory pleasure can make people happier and willing to spend more for less food, a triple win for public health, consumers and businesses alike. In five experiments, American and French adults and children were asked to imagine vividly the taste, smell and oro-haptic sensations of three hedonic foods prior to choosing a portion size of another hedonic food. Compared to a control condition, this “multisensory imagery” intervention led hungry and non-dieting people to choose smaller food portions, yet they anticipated greater eating enjoyment and were willing to pay more for them. This occurred because it prompted participants to evaluate portions based on expected sensory pleasure, which peaks with smaller portions, rather than on hunger. In contrast, health-based interventions led people to choose a smaller portion than the one they expected to enjoy most—a hedonic cost for them and an economic cost for food marketers.
The primary goal of this research is to conceptualize and develop a scale of green consumption values, which we define as the tendency to express the value of environmental protection through one’s purchases and consumption behaviors. Across six studies, we demonstrate that the six-item measure we develop (i.e., the GREEN scale) can be used to capture green consumption values in a reliable, valid, and parsimonious manner. We further theorize and empirically demonstrate that green consumption values are part of a larger nomological network associated with conservation of not just environmental resources but also personal financial and physical resources. Finally, we demonstrate that the GREEN scale predicts consumer preference for environmentally friendly products. In doing so, we demonstrate that stronger green consumption values increase preference for environmentally friendly products through more favorable evaluations of the non-environmental attributes of these products. These results have important implications for consumer responses to the growing number of environmentally friendly products.
Using data from a survey of over 700 Americans, we sought to measure and investigate the nature of citizen’s political ideologies in relation to food. Results reveal that a majority of respondents can be classified as “food statists,” desiring more government action in the realm food and agricultural relative to the status quo. People’s ideologies with regard to food were multidimensional, falling along lines related to food health and quality, food safety, and farm subsidies. Respondents were most in favor of additional government action related to food safety. Food ideology was related to conventional measures of political ideology with, for example, more liberal respondents desiring more government involvement in food than more conservative respondents, but the relationship was far from determinative, suggesting food ideology represents a unique construct in its own right.
A series of experiments demonstrates that consumers exhibit aversion to waste during forward-looking purchase. These experiments further reveal that such behavior is driven by distaste for unused utility, a reaction that is shown to be distinct from an aversion to squandering money. Waste aversion is especially pronounced when consumers anticipate future consequences and deprivation is salient. In addition to demonstrating robustness across consumers and marketing contexts, the results also demonstrate how waste aversion can lead to self-defeating behavior in which consumers forego desired utility. Finally, the present research demonstrates and discusses the implications of waste aversion for a variety of marketing issues, including buy-rent markets, bundling, and the fundamental distinction between goods and services.
This study examined a three-step adaptation of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) applied to the intention of consumers to purchase sustainably sourced food. The sample consisted of 137 participants, of which 109 were female, who were recruited through a farmers market and an organic produce outlet in an Australian capital city. Participants completed an online questionnaire containing the TPB scales of attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and intention; measures of positive moral attitude and ethical self identity; and food choice motives. Hierarchical multiple regression was used to examine the predictive utility of the TPB in isolation (step 1) and the TPB expanded to include the constructs of moral attitude and ethical self-identity (step 2). The results indicated the expansion of the TPB to include these constructs added significantly to the predictive model measuring intention to purchase sustainably sourced food. The third step in the adaptation utilised this expanded TPB model and added a measure of retail channel (where consumers reported buying fresh produce) and 9 food choice motives, in order to assess the predictive utility of the inclusion of choice motivations in this context. Of the 8 food choice motives examined, only health and ethical values significantly predicted intention to purchase sustainably sourced food. However, with the addition of food choice motives, ethical self-identity was no longer a significant predictor of intention to purchase sustainably sourced food. Overall the adapted TPB model explained 76% of the variance in intention to purchase sustainably sourced food.
Participants are not always as diligent in reading and following instructions as experimenters would like them to be. When participants fail to follow instructions, this increases noise and decreases the validity of their data. This paper presents and validates a new tool for detecting participants who are not following instructions – the Instructional manipulation check (IMC). We demonstrate how the inclusion of an IMC can increase statistical power and reliability of a dataset.
The Squander Sequence: Understanding Food Waste at Each Stage of the Consumer Decision-Making Process
- Lauren G Block
- A Punam
- Beth Keller
- Sara Vallen
- Mia M Williamson
- Amir Birau
- Kelly L Grinstein
- Monica C Haws
- Cait Labarge
- Elizabeth S Lamberton
- Emily M Moore
- Rebecca Walker Moscato
- Andrea Heintz Reczek
- Tangari
Block, Lauren G., Punam A. Keller, Beth Vallen, Sara Williamson, Mia M. Birau,
Amir Grinstein, Kelly L. Haws, Monica C. LaBarge, Cait Lamberton, Elizabeth S. Moore, Emily M. Moscato, Rebecca Walker Reczek, and Andrea
Heintz Tangari (2016), "The Squander Sequence: Understanding Food
Waste at Each Stage of the Consumer Decision-Making Process," Journal
of Public Policy and Marketing, 35 (2), 292-304.
Without Empathy, Nothing Works': Chef José Andrés Wants to Feed the World through the Pandemic
- Sean Gregory
Gregory, Sean (2020), "'Without Empathy, Nothing Works': Chef José
Andrés Wants to Feed the World through the Pandemic," Time Magazine, March 26, https://time.com/collection/apart-not-alone/5809169
/jose-andres-coronavirus-food/.
- John T Jost
- M Christopher
- Jaime L Federico
- Napier
Jost, John T., Christopher M. Federico, and Jaime L. Napier (2009), "Political Ideology: Its Structure, Functions, and Elective Affinities," Annual
Review of Psychology, 60 (January), 307-37.