Elsevier

Appetite

Volume 170, 1 March 2022, 105877
Appetite

You read what you eat! Selective exposure effects as obstacles for environmental risk communication in the meat consumption debate

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2021.105877Get rights and content

Abstract

The selective exposure effect describes people's tendency to prefer information that confirms rather than challenges existing beliefs. The present research replicates the selective exposure effect in the context of meat reduction as a proposed strategy to combat climate change. Additionally, we tested whether biased information selection can help explain polarization dynamics on the individual and group-level. We recruited a French crowd working sample (n = 351) to take part in an online study. Our research design included a selective exposure paradigm in which people could skip through a set of news headlines and decide for each headline whether to access an associated full text. The headlines either promoted or rejected meat reduction as effective environmental strategy. In accordance with the selective exposure effect, participants systematically preferred information in favor of their dietary habits. On a personal level, selective exposure indirectly accounted for attitudes towards meat reduction. On a social level, selective exposure indirectly accounted for indicators of group polarization. Overall, the findings demonstrate how psychological motives underlying information selection may hamper effective risk communication and could sharpen social divide in the climate change context. We discuss opportunities for future research and practical efforts to improve the efficacy of environmental risk communication.

Introduction

Livestock farming accounts for approximately 14.5% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and is responsible for around 70% of the planet's deforestation. Lowering the amount of meat consumption therefore provides an effective opportunity to counteract global warming and loss of biodiversity. While researchers have outlined the potential environmental benefits resulting from a reduction of global livestock production, this powerful potential, however, remains widely unused in practice (Stoll-Kleemann & Schmidt, 2017). According to OECD data, 325 Mt of meat have been globally produced in the year 2019. High income countries such as Australia and the United States disproportionately contribute to livestock demand with meat supplies exceeding 120 Kg per capita as compared to 43 kg of world average (Ritchie & Roser, 2019). The amount of global meat consumption is expected to increase by 14% in the next decade, up to a level of 374 Mt of global meat production by 2030, mainly because of rising incomes and growing populations in so-called developing regions of the world (OECD/FAO, 2021).

Given such projections, one may question whether large scale meat reduction will be possible. Indeed, by today omnivore diets are still reflecting the norm for many people around the globe. Survey data from 28 countries and roughly 20.000 participants, indicated that 73% of respondents regularly consumed animal products (IPSOS, 2018). However, in contrast to these numbers, some more promising observations seem noteworthy. The same dataset indicated that younger participants were more likely to restrict their meat intake as compared to older participants. Additionally, most participants who chose to follow meat free diets made this decision within the last five years before data collection. These “trends” towards meat reduction particularly among younger generations resonate with the increasing consumer demand for plant-based proteins (Boukid, 2021).

Food is an essential element in people's lives and as such shaped by an array of contextual, social, and individual factors. The accessibility and quality of certain ingredients, existing food norms and cooking styles, as well as personal values and expectations are just a few examples of the palette of parameters influencing whether people seek to maintain or modify their eating routine (for a more exhaustive overview see Graça et al., 2019). However, in contrast to the vast impact meat consumption exerts on the environment, environmental concerns seem to play a considerably smaller role in peoples’ food choices (Corrin & Papadopoulos, 2017). In fact, even for people who are motivated to reduce their own carbon footprint, curtailing meat appears as a rather unfavorable strategy (Sanchez-Sabate & Sabaté, 2019). The relatively low impact of environmental concerns on meat consumption might be explained by the fact that people tend to underestimate the environmental impact of global livestock (Macdiarmid et al., 2016; Vanhonacker et al., 2013). One may thus wonder whether, for people who enjoy eating meat, the costs of meat curtailing appear simply as too high as compared to the expected environmental benefits.

If people tend to underestimate the environmental costs of meat consumption, better informing them about the impact of their food choices should gravitate them towards more sustainable diets. Indeed, experimental research provided some evidence for this idea (Harguess et al., 2020). Nevertheless, there have also been some notable limitations suggesting that what prevents people from curtailing meat is more than a mere lack of information. One of the factors that alters the efficacy of education-based interventions lies in people's pre-existing attachment to meat consumption. For instance, data from a representative Finish adults sample suggested a small positive effect of environmental risk exposure on participants meat reduction intentions (Vainio et al., 2018). A deeper look at the data however, revealed that this effect was qualified by participants initial dietary orientation. The data showed that only participants who were already skeptical towards meat consumption reported intentions for dietary adjustments after being exposed to information that outlined the environmental costs of livestock. Exposure to that same information, however, did not alter dietary intentions of participants who were favorable towards meat consumption. These and similar findings suggest that compact risk information can motive people to adjust their diets if people consider curtailing meat as a comparably low-cost strategy for environmental protection.

In attempts to enhance the efficacy of risk communication, researcher have dedicated considerable work to optimize the form and framing of information (for reviews see Kwasny et al., 2022; Harguess et al., 2020). The present research seeks to complement these efforts by addressing a related but largely neglected issue that precedes any potential information exposure. In natural information environments, people can choose from a myriad of media with conflicting information about the environmental impact of meat consumption. It is possible, that people simply avoid information that could question and potentially change their eating routine or seek information that downplays the environmental costs of meat consumption. Gaining a better understanding about factors that alter people's information choices may thus help improve the outreach and efficacy of risk communication.

A first goal of the present research is therefore to understand decision making processes when people are allowed to seek information from a pool of options. Taking previous findings into account, we will examine information selection behavior as a function of people's initial attachment to meat consumption. A second goal concerns potential impacts of people's selection behavior on wider perceptions related to public debates about meat consumption and reduction. To this aim, we will test whether selection biases underlying information choices can account for variations in people's own attitudes as well as in the evaluation of others who embrace similar or opposing dietary-related viewpoints.

Much of the available research that studied effects of information exposure on people's dietary orientation relied on forced exposure paradigms that randomly expose participants to different types of information (e.g., risk information vs. control information). Forced exposure designs often reflect the gold standard as they permit researchers to evaluate the causal impact of a stimuli (e.g., risk information) on an outcome of interest (e.g., dietary intentions). Forced exposure design, however, are not free from limitations particularly with regard to their ecological validity. In forced exposure designs, individuals are treated as passive recipients of information while in the natural world, people can actively seek information from an almost infinite pool of options. Overlooking this freedom is not only of theoretical concerns but may carry considerable practical costs. Why? Because even the most fine-tuned information will not exert its desired impact if it fails to reach its target audience in the first place. To address this important limitation, the present research chooses a free choice paradigm that allows participants to actively select information about the environmental impact of meat consumption from a set of options.

Studying information selection behavior under free choice conditions holds a long tradition in different disciplines such as psychology, communication science, and political science. The selective exposure effect describes peoples’ tendency to prefer attitude confirming over attitude challenging information (for a meta-analysis see Hart et al., 2009). A traditional explanation for this effect is that people implicitly seek to avoid cognitive dissonance and thus prefer to reinforce rather than challenge their existing beliefs (Festinger, 1957). Recent approaches emphasized the involvement of the self, arguing that selective exposure may serve as a strategy to support self-relevant goals and help people maintain a congruent and positive self-image (for a review see Knobloch-Westerwick, 2015). Seeking information that downplays the environmental costs of meat consumption may thus not only help people with strong meat attachment to avoid dissonance inducing cognitions but also confer more deeply rooted concerns related to their identity.

In accordance with such motivational explanations, previous research suggests that meat consumers are indeed motivated to downplay the negative consequences of their eating routine. For instance, researchers observed that participant's self-identification as meat consumer negatively predicted meat curtailment intentions (Ginn & Lickel, 2020). While this result may not seem very surprising at first sight, it is important to note that the described relationship was mediated by beliefs in the efficacy of meat reduction as a measure to combat climate change. The authors argued that reduced efficacy beliefs among meat consumers may result from a psychological urge to legitimize their food choices. Self-serving motivational impulses have also been used to explain humans downplaying animal sufferance to morally legitimize meat consumption (e.g., Loughnan et al., 2010). However, as far as we know, the role of motivational factors in altering whether people seek or avoid dietary related risk information has yet to be explored.

To sum up, despite large evidence for selective exposure tendencies, to the best of our knowledge, the present research is the first to validate this effect in the context of meat reduction as a measure for environmental protection. Following previous findings on the selective exposure effect, we expect that under free choice conditions, people will favor dietary supportive information over dietary challenging information. Information that stresses the negative environmental consequences of meat consumption should hence be favored by people who identify as low meat consumers. Conversely, people who identity as frequent meat consumers should favor information that downplays the environmental risk of meat consumption. In short, we predict that:

H1

Participants will preferably access information that supports their meat-related dietary identity.

Previous research suggests that biased information seeking can strengthen people's pre-existing attitudes and beliefs (e.g., Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2015; Newman et al., 2018). Such attitude dynamics may have larger societal consequences as selective information exposure has been proposed to underly macro level shifts towards attitude extremity (Stroud, 2010). It seems thus reasonable to assume that people may develop stronger attitudes towards meat consumption due to biases in media selection. However, a common limitation of one-session selective exposure designs is that they prohibit researchers from drawing definite conclusions regarding the causal direction of effects. In other words, the gain in ecological validity when using free choice designs is often achieved at the expense of internal validity. Consequently, we formulate the following our hypotheses regarding the expected outcomes of selective exposure in relational terms. Regarding the impact of selective exposure on attitudes, we hypothesize that:

H2

Selective information seeking will be positively associated with (post-exposure) attitudes about meat reduction.

Understanding interplays between media choices and opinion dynamics is important to understand changes in individuals’ receptiveness to environmental risk information. Tackling global challenges such as climate change, however, likewise involves a range of social phenomena that may hamper or facilitate the generation of effective solutions. In attempts to take a step into that direction, the present research goes beyond individual attitudes and simultaneously examines how selective exposure may correspond to group-level polarization. The assumption that individuals regulate not only their personal but also their social identity (e.g., Spears, 2011) through selective exposure has been corroborated in different contexts, including political partisanship (Knobloch-Westerwick & Hastall, 2010), age groups (Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng, 2011), and national identities (Lueders et al., 2019; Wojcieszak & Garrett, 2018). However, while these studies have focused on rather stable social categories it remains yet to test whether selective exposure can also inform intergroup discrimination based on shared belief over more punctual issues such as meat consumption. There is indeed evidence indicating that topic-based opinions can serve as a basis for shared group identities and that such groups may fuel social fragmentation and conflict (Bliuc et al., 2015; Maher et al., 2020). Identifying elements that correspond to the emergence of social polarization seems key if one seeks to promote large scale consensus over climate change tactics. We propose that selective exposure reflects one of these elements and put the following hypothesis to the test:

H3

Selective information seeking will be positively associated with (post exposure) group polarization.

Section snippets

Present research

The selective exposure effect describes a biased selection tendency for attitude supporting over attitude challenging information. The present research applies this effect to the context of meat reduction as a potential strategy to combat climate change. By simultaneously considering an individual and social level of analysis, the present research seeks to improve the understanding how biased media diets may correspond to individual and group-level polarization.

Participants

The present research uses a dataset of 353 French participants. The sample includes data from 52 undergraduate university students as well as from 301 crowd workers.1,2

Material & procedure

The study was programmed with Qualtrics survey software. Participants were invited to take part in a research project that examined links between social media and food choices. Before starting the survey, participants agreed to an informed consent that was developed based on guidelines delivered by the universities ethical review board. The survey was presented in the following order:

Preliminary analysis

Before starting our main analysis, we estimated a regression model that predicted self-identification as meat consumer from sociodemographic factors. We regressed participants age, gender, formal education level, ideological orientation, and perceived social economic status onto identification as meat consumer. The model was significant, F(5,327) = 7.518, p < .001, with an R2 of 11%. Males were more likely than females to identify as meat consumers, b = .204, SE = .097, t(5, 327) = 2.11, p

General discussion

There is now considerable evidence suggesting that a significant decrease in global meat consumption could hold noteworthy environmental benefits (González et al., 2020). Nevertheless, many people seem to reject the idea to curtail their meat intake. In the present research, we argued that self-serving biases underlying information selection behavior could help to explain this incongruence. Inspired by previous research on selective exposure effects, we hypothesized that people favorably seek

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article contains supplementary material for replication, which is available under: https://osf.io/qvd9w/?view_only=a1dea2223d6043e9948f7ea24f1da9f7.

Ethical standards

This research received ethical approval from by institutional review board of the University Clermont Auvergne (IRB00011540-2020-43) and complies with the APA ethical regulations for research on human subjects. All participants gave informed consent before taking part in the research.

Funding

The project was supported with grants from the French national funding agency (ANR-18-ORAR-0003, ANR-20-SOLS-0001-01) and from the European Research Council (No. 802421).

Contributions

Conceptualization (all authors), Material Development (1st, 2nd), Participant Recruitment (1st, 3rd), Analysis (1st, 2nd), Writing (1st), Editing (2nd, 3rd, 4th).

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