Are You Motivated to Break the Habit?

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Are You Motivated to Break the Habit?

The Effect of Disgust on Reducing Meat Consumption

By

Nina Lotte Kester

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Are You Motivated to Break the Habit?

The Effect of Disgust on Reducing Meat Consumption

Master Thesis, MSc Marketing Management

University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics and Business

January 14, 2019

Author Nina Lotte Kester

s2574640

Poelestraat 19a 9711PG Groningen

n.l.kester@rug.nl +31651212554

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ABSTRACT

There are many environmental challenges nowadays and meat consumption is one of them. Meat consumption is a habit in our society which needs to be broken in order to save the environment. Habits are often more difficult to change since they are deeply solidified. This research investigates whether disgust could help in the reduction of meat consumption. Disgust might help with creating negative associations towards meat consumption and these associations will help people to reduce their consumption. More specifically, this study examines whether disgust is more effective when people are already willing to reduce meat consumption habits. An online survey is conducted and data of 136 participants is used to test whether the willingness to reduce meat consumption influences the effect of disgust. The findings suggest that disgust does have a positive effect on people’s intention to change behaviour. Contrary to what was expected, results show that disgust is less effective for people who were more willing to change their meat consumption. Overall, this research provides more evidence for the different effects of disgust. Personal characteristics have to be considered when using disgust in anti-meat consumption campaigns.

Keywords: habits; meat consumption; ethical behaviour; disgust; motivated attention;

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PREFACE

Consumer well-being has always been one of my biggest interests in the field of marketing. My bachelor thesis in Communication Studies was about health communication and making narratives more effective and persuasive. Since then my interest in consumer well-being grew. Because meat consumption is a very present-day discussed issues, I decided to do something with that. I call myself a ‘flexitarian’ and I was always interested in what really keeps me away from becoming a real vegetarian. Well, I noticed it is so anchored in our system and it feels almost not naturally to quit eating meat.

The period of writing my Master Thesis made me a more knowledgeable person than before and I have learned to become self-sufficient. I have investigated new things and I have tried to find answers to my own questions. By finishing this thesis, I am ready for a new chapter in my life. After five years of studying at the University of Groningen and experiencing life as a student, it is almost time to leave this beautiful and cosy city.

I would like to thank Dr Jan Willem Bolderdijk for helping me during the whole process of writing my thesis. He has always provided me with very helpful feedback and helped me out whenever I was lost. Besides, I want to thank my group members for motivating each other during the journey. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family who supported me during the process of writing my thesis, but also during my whole student period. A new period in my life has arrived and I am ready for it!

Nina Lotte Kester

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INTRODUCTION

Over the last years, the environment is suffering more and more and this is a consequence of human actions. Meat consumption still rises worldwide. More specifically, it is one of the most environment polluting activities of human beings (Godfray et al., 2018) and this is contributing to climate change (Hedenus et al., 2014). Meat production causes 40% of climate pollution, but why is this? With livestock farming, a high amount of greenhouse gases and carbon is released, which is bad for the environment. Besides, the production of meat requires a lot of water and land (de Boer, de Witt & Aiking, 2016). Data of the past ten years shows that the total meat consumption per head of the population in the Netherlands is still rising (Terluin, Dagevos, Verhoog & Wijsman, 2016). Meat consumption is a present-day topic since the environment is rapidly changing. In order to reduce environmental pollution, meat consumption should be reduced.

An important question related to environmental pollution is how meat consumption can be reduced and how the habit of consuming meat can be broken. First of all, it must be noticed that when behaviour is habitual, it is more difficult to change this behaviour (Verplanken & Wood, 2006). Therefore, solely informing people might not be enough in order to break this habit. So, giving meat-eaters information about how ‘bad’ it is to consume meat will probably not result in reduced meat consumption. The process of persuading these people should be more profound and therefore other strategies should be used. Making a message more profound can be done by evoking emotions. People often fall back on their emotions when decisions have to be made and they are therefore very important in the field of marketing. (O’Neill, Hubbard & Palmer, 2008).

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Thus, this research examines the different effects of disgust on people’s intention to reduce their meat consumption. Disgust might work better when people are already aware of the consequences of consuming meat or even intended to reduce their consumption. The

willingness to change meat consumption before people get exposed to a disgusting message may be of great interest in order to investigate the effect of disgust. Therefore, the following research question is formulated:

Is a disgusting image in an anti-meat consumption campaign more effective when people are more willing to change their meat consumption?

Although consuming meat is anchored in our system, we need to take action. This begins with understanding how we can change this polluting habit. This research will contribute to

existing research in a few ways. First, research so far yields contradicting results of the effect of disgust in well-being campaigns and it is not clear why disgust has either positive or negative effects (Nabi, 1998). The present study will therefore focus more on why these effects are so different, and this will contribute to existing research. In addition, the findings of the present study may have practical implications for marketers. A better understanding of the use of disgust as emotion in persuasion processes can help marketers with making their message more convincing. The willingness to reduce meat consumption could be important to take into account when using disgusting images in persuasive messages. To conclude, getting more insight into all this seems important for the future of anti-meat consumption campaigns because habits are obviously hard to break. The environment is suffering and in order to save the planet, campaigns have to be highly effective. In a broader perspective, this research will also create a deeper understanding of the use of disgust in other well-being campaigns.

In the literature section there will be more attention to existing literature of the different fields discussed in this introduction and after that, in the methodology, the research methods will be presented. This will be followed by the findings of the study, the conclusion and the

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THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Habits

Global meat consumption continues to grow and this is a habit that should be broken in order to save our environment. In case of reducing meat consumption, it is important to first focus on what a habit exactly is to gain understanding of how to break it. In our lives we need a certain level of ‘equilibrium’. This means we do our activities more frequently and we create our own routines and habits in life. This can be all kind of activities like doing groceries daily, have dinner with your friends every Friday evening (Kippenberger, 1998) or consume meat every day. Lally et al. (2009) stated that behaviour becomes a habit when it is repeated and when you do this behaviour more automatically and with less control. However, the more often this specific behaviour is performed, the smaller the intention that people change that behaviour (Ouellette & Wood, 1998). This is important to take into account when meat consumption has to be reduced. Verplanken and Wood (2006) also confirmed that health care interventions with the goal to change ethical behaviour are less effective when a behaviour has become a habit. Thus, meat consumption is hard to change and what remains unclear is how to break this polluting habit.

Emotions

Nabi (2002) argued that behaviour is often a response of emotions that people feel. Therefore, to change a more solidified behaviour, emotions might be the start of behavioural change. Several studies pointed out that there is a positive relation between emotions and attitudes (De Graaf, Hoeken, Sanders & Beentjes, 2009; Murphy, Frank, Chatterjee & Baezconde, 2013). Evoking specific emotions in a persuasive message can ensure that attitudes change. Attitudes are closely linked to behaviour and therefore it is very important to change people’s attitudes (Bagozzi, Gopinath & Nyer, 1999). They also argued that there are a lot of determinants related to emotional responses. How an individual evaluates the physical circumstances, the type of event and their existing beliefs play an important role in how they feel.

Dillard and Nabi (2006) claimed that emotions could enhance but also inhibit a positive persuasive effect. Consistent with Bagozzi et al. (1999), Dillard and Nabi (2006) pointed out that the same emotional states in different circumstances might cause different effects. Moreover, not all emotions will have a direct persuasive effect: a change of people’s

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communication messages are often more persuasive when they arouse emotional responses. Dillard and Nabi (2006) claimed that health communication messages usually arouse negative emotions because often emotionally charged diseases are getting attention in this type of communication. However, consistent with the findings of Dillard and Nabi (2006), Peters, Ruiter and Kok (2013) argued that after decades of research the effect of emotional appeals is still unclear. Meulenaer, De Pelsmaker and Dens (2015) suggested that future research should focus on different types of messages and on different health or ethical issues. They used emotions like fear and anxiety but did not include disgust as an emotional appeal in their research. The present study will therefore focus on this specific emotion, to investigate whether this can contribute to breaking the habit of meat consumption.

Disgust

Disgust is an emotion that can have an effect on persuasion both positively and negatively. Clifford and Jerit (2018) pointed out that disgust can have an upstream and downstream effect on the willingness to engage with a topic. This means it can have both positive and negative effects on information processing. Research showed that exposing people to a disgusting message increases the memory of the message (Chapman, Kristen, Poppenk, Moscovitch & Anderson, 2013). Additionally, disgust can cause offensive reactions and this can be related to deviance: “something is not as it should be” (Rozin, Haidt, McCauley, 1999). When this happens, an individual distances him or herself from the offending stimulus or they get away from the situation, which can be done by covering the eyes or engage in something

distracting. Even though people might distance themselves, disgust can still have positive effects on persuasion (Rozin et al., 1994).

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helps with changing undesired or risky behaviour (Dillard & Nabi, 2006; Nabi, 2002; Shimp & Stuart, 2004).

In contrast to these positive effects of disgust, disgust can also have a negative effect on people’s intention to change behaviour. Nabi (1998) studied on the one hand how disgust can enhance persuasion and on the other hand how it can inhibit persuasion. Even though disgust can be a dominant emotion, sometimes avoidance can be the easiest way to handle a

disgusting message and this will reduce message attention and persuasion.Nabi (1998) found that the relation between disgust and persuasion can be dependent on the context in which disgust is aroused. In addition to these findings, Nabi (1998) proposed that disgust can also cause avoidance and the consequence is that people are less motivated to change their undesired behaviour because they do not process information close enough. This happens because people find the message too disgusting to look at and they want to turn their eyes away from the image. Consistent with this line of reasoning, Lerner, Small and Loewenstein (2004) found that using disgusting appeals led avoidance of the message and therefore the concerned issue. Others stated that it is not necessary to make a persuasive message fearful or disgusting. Moreover, it is about the information of that specific ‘bad’ behaviour that is in the message (de Hoog et al., 2007).

Although there are many studies about disgust, it can be concluded that the results so far are contradictory. As Nabi (1998) proposed, the negative effects of disgust can be caused by avoidance of the message. He claimed that further research should focus on the situations in which disgust has either positive or negative effects. Additionally, people’s cognitive

processes might play a role by determining if they accept or avoid a message. Therefore, this study focuses on this so-called motivated attention: are people motivated to accept the message? Moreover, this research investigates why and when disgust has a positive effect on reducing meat consumption habits. This might depend on how motivated people are to process the message.

Motivated attention

Avoided disgusting messages make a message less persuasive because people do not process the message at all (Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 1997). How individuals respond to an

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engage in a message. When the message is more pleasant or beneficial for an individual they are more likely to accept the message. However, when they interpret the stimuli as harmful they will move towards avoiding behaviour (Chen & Bargh, 1999). Many researchers found that people process information that is consistent with their existing goals and that high involvement increases persuasion (Downar et al., 2002; Petty & Cacioppo, 1979; Simons & Chabris 1999; Yoon & Tinkham, 1986). This implies that people who are not involved may not accept the message. Going back to disgust and meat consumption, it may mean that people have to feel involved with the ethical issue to accept a disgusting message about the issue. As mentioned earlier, disgust can help with creating negative associations towards undesired and risky behaviour. However, when people avoid the message, a negative association with meat consumption cannot be created.

The contradicting results of the effect of disgust on persuasion might be caused by attention towards the message. When there is low involvement with an issue, there might be a bigger chance that the message will be avoided and disgust will have a negative effect. Low involved people do not feel related to the message and may therefore avoid the message. Moreover, when someone avoids a message they may not accept the given information and there will probably be no persuasion effect. On the other hand, when people feel more involved they are more likely to accept the message. They agree with the given information and feel more related to the topic. In this research, there is going to be investigated if this motivated

attention mediates the effect of disgust on the intention to reduce meat consumption. In other words, do people first have to accept the disgusting message before it can have an effect on the intention to change behaviour? The first hypothesis can be formulated:

H1: The effect of disgust on the intention to reduce meat consumption is mediated by motivated attention towards the message.

Willingness to change

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will be. Those who are more willing to change might force themselves to look carefully at this disgusting image. They want the association between the disgusting image and the undesired behaviour to become stronger. People who are on the other hand not willing to change their behaviour will probably avoid disgusting messages because they want to prevent that this undesired behaviour becomes associated with a negative emotion. People who want to keep eating meat may not want negative associations towards meat. Accepting the negative

message will result in negative emotions and they do not want to feel these emotions towards meat consumption. Overall, willingness to change might be an important determinant to take into account when researching the effect of disgust on motivated attention.

As of today, research did not focus on the relationship between willingness to change and disgust in campaigns about ethical behaviour. Nevertheless, Prochaska and DiClemente (1992) found in their study with adolescent smokers that willingness to change affects current smoking behaviour. Smokers who already wanted to quit smoking smoked less than smokers who had no plans to quit smoking. This means that their willingness to change had a positive effect on smoking behaviour. People who are not willing to change at all and are furthermore not aware of the problem will be hardest to influence since they have no intention to change their behaviour. On the other hand, for those people already thinking about changing their behaviour, their intention just needs to be translated into actual change. Associating a negative emotion like disgust with this undesired behaviour might help with turning an intention into behaviour.

Chen & Bargh (1999) confirmed that when people are more involved with the content of the message they will be more likely to accept that message. People who are willing to reduce their meat consumption feel probably more involved with the disgusting message. Therefore, these willing people will also be more likely to expose themselves to the disgusting image. Consequently, the chance that the disgusting message will cause a negative association towards meat consumption is bigger. So, the effect of disgust might become stronger when people are already intended to change their behaviour. Based on this line of reasoning the last hypothesis is formulated:

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METHODOLOGY

The present study tries to find evidence for the following hypotheses: ‘the effect of disgust on the intention to reduce meat consumption is mediated by motivated attention towards the message’ and ‘the effect of disgust on motivated attention is positively moderated by the willingness to change’.

In order to test these hypotheses, a quantitative research was conducted. An experimental between-subjects design was used where people either got exposed to the experimental condition or to the control condition. The experimental condition existed of a disgusting fact about meat and the control condition included a non-disgusting fact about meat. Data was collected between November 20th_{and November 26}th_{via Qualtrics; an online survey}

software. To get enough participants, the non-probability sample technique ‘snowball sampling’ was used. The researcher shared the survey with friends and family and thereafter these people shared it with their friends and family. This technique ensured that 196 people participated in the study.

Procedure

The survey started with the informed consent, where participants gave permission for using their responses confidentially. They also had to be eighteen years or older because the survey included a shocking image, namely the disgusting image of meat. Secondly, some

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Moderator - Stage of change

The purpose of this study was to investigate if disgust had more effect on the intention to reduce meat consumption when people were already willing to change their meat

consumption. To operationalize willingness to change, the stages of change of Prochaska (1979) were used. Prochaska (1979) pointed out that people go through six stages. The first stage is the pre-contemplation stage. In this stage, an individual does not have the intention to change their behaviour. Most of them are unaware of the issue. The second one is the

contemplation stage, the stage where the individual is aware of the issue. They are now thinking about the issue as something that needs to be changed in the future, but they do not take action already. A lot of people stay in this stage forever because they do not have the motivation to really act upon this specific behaviour. Preparation is the next stage and the individual has the intention to actually change his or her behaviour. They will plan to take action very soon. They modify this intention to behaviour in the fourth stage: the action stage. After the individual takes action, it is important that they maintain this behaviour. When this happens the individual arrives in the maintenance stage, which is the fifth stage. Finally, they will arrive in the termination stage. The individual completed the whole change process and there is no risk that they fall back in their old behaviour.

In order to measure the participants’ stage of change, some questions were conducted and these were asked before participants got exposed to the manipulation. An altered version of a stage of change questionnaire was used (McConnaughy & Prochaska, 1983). To track down the stage of change people were in, only three stages were used for the questions: the pre-contemplation, contemplation and preparation stage. This is also how McConnaughy and Prochaska (1983) measured the stages of change. Besides, there would be too many questions when questions about all six stages would be asked. Lastly, questions about the action,

maintenance and termination stage would look similar, since people in these stages already changed their behaviour.

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In total, 24 questions were asked about participant’s willingness to change. To prevent

suspicion, also questions about alcohol consumption, sugar consumption and food waste were asked. This was done to put the participants on the wrong track. The overall purpose seemed to be about ethical food consumption in general. In the table below the questions per stage can be found. The Cronbach’s α for the pre-contemplation, contemplation and the preparation phase questions were respectively .72 (M = 3.14, SD =.63), .75 (M = 5.10, SD = .41) and .94 (M = 4.36, SD = .52). So, there was sufficient internal consistency between the three questions of each stage of change and therefore they were taken together into one scale. To conclude, there were three separate mean scores of each stage of change.

Pre-contemplation Contemplation Preparation

It’s a waste of time thinking about reducing meat

consumption because I do not see it as a problem

Sometimes I wonder if eating less meat would be better

I want to start carrying out a plan to cut down or stop eating meat

There is nothing I really need to change about my meat consumption pattern

Eating too much meat can be a problem

I am actually willing to change my consumption patterns when it comes down to meat eating There is nothing seriously

wrong with eating meat

Sometimes I think I should quit or cut down on my meat consumption

I am willing to actively work on reducing my meat consumption

Independent variable - Disgust

After the questions about the stages of change participants got exposed to seven food facts which started with “did you know that”. These surprising food facts were about alcohol consumption, food waste, sugar and meat consumption. The participants in the experimental and the control condition were exposed to the same facts, except for the fact about meat. The experimental group saw the image in figure 2 (disgusting image) and the control group saw the image in figure 3 (control image). The fact that belonged to the disgusting image was: “did you know butchers often do not cut tumours out of animals in the slaughterhouse and there is a chance your hamburger contains this 'pus'” and the fact that belonged to the control image was: “Did you know McDonald’s sells 75 hamburgers every second of the day?”. The disgusting image was chosen because it perfectly fitted the fact of tumours in meat.

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To check if this fact and image were really experienced as disgusting a manipulation check was done. The disgusting image was shown to approximately twenty people who were more or less related to the researcher. Age varied from 12 till 60 years and both men and women were asked to give their opinion about the disgusting image. There can be concluded that the image is experienced as disgusting for all ages. When the researcher asked their opinion, 100% of the people found it disgusting. These twenty people did not participate in the study because they already knew the core of the research.

Mediator - Motivated attention

Motivated attention had to be measured via the computer. To measure this, the seconds respondents looked at the disgust-eliciting image (experimental group) vs. control image (control group) were measured. A time-tool was added in Qualtrics to see how many seconds participants looked at either the disgusting image or the control image. It was decided that the longer people looked at the message, the more they were engaging with it.

Dependent variable - Intention

The dependent variable intention was measured with two questions. First, a statement was given about if they would like to eat a hamburger right now. Again, to prevent suspicion and make the study more logical, the same statements were given about alcohol and sugary food. Participants had to indicate if they agreed with the statements on a Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). After that, participants got exposed to a petition of the meat free week. They had to indicate on a Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) if they would sign up and participate in the meat free week (figure 4). There were thus two questions measuring intention. The Cronbach’s α of these two questions was .47 (M = 4.78, SD = .73), which means the two questions were not measuring the same.

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Therefore, the two questions could not have been taken together. It could be the case that one of the two questions had a low internal validity: it did not measure what it had to measure. There possibly were other factors that could have been influencing the answers on the question ‘I would like to eat a hamburger right now’. The question about the meat free week was therefore used as ‘main’ measure of intention in the analyses. However, to be transparent, results will also be presented when the scores of the question if they would like to eat a

hamburger were used as measure for intention. The survey can be found in appendix 1.

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RESULTS

Descriptive statistics

The dataset consisted of 196 Participants. Some participants started with the survey but did not complete it. Therefore, 50 participants were excluded from the data analysis. Because participants were obligated to answer all the questions, no additional participants were

excluded. Because vegetarians already changed their behaviour, they were left out of the data analysis as well. There were nine vegetarians and one person who did not agree with the informed consent so the final dataset consisted of 136 participants.

From these participants, 48 of the participants were male (35.3%) and 88 were female (64.7%). The average age of these people was 29 years (M = 29.77, SD = 11.00) with a minimum of 18 and a maximum of 63 years old. Thus, there was a range of 45 years. Most of the participants were from the Netherlands (92.6%) and 2.2% was from Italy. The remaining 5.2% were participants from countries all over the world. From the 136 participants, 61 completed University (44.9%) and 30.1% completed University of applied sciences. This is already 75%. Less than 1% only completed lower general secondary education and 16.5% completed higher secondary education or pre-university education and might be studying right now. After the demographics, there were some consumption questions. However, the answers to the questions about alcohol use, sugar consumption and food waste were not analysed. These questions had to distract the participant from the real research topic. The question about how many times a week they eat meat was meant to filter out the vegetarians: they answered ‘never’ to this question.

The mediator variable, motivated attention, was measured by time in seconds. The range of the total time participants looked at either the disgusting or control image was 29.77 with an average of 8.11 seconds (SD = 6.49). The differences between the disgusting and the control image were tremendous. Participants looked on average almost three times longer at the disgusting image (Mdisgust = 12.10, SD = 6.74, Mcontrol 4.12, SD = 2.68). It seems that

participants may have been fascinated by the image. The time participants looked at either the disgusting and control image were taken together as ‘total motivated attention’. An

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looked at the experimental or control image more than 25 seconds. In order to make the data more normally distributed, these five outliers were excluded. Though, to be transparent, the results including outliers can be found in appendix C.

Preliminary analysis

To check for correlations between the variables, a correlation analysis was performed. Gender correlated positively with the scores on the contemplation and preparation questions and correlated negatively with the pre-contemplation scores. Women were more willing to change their meat consumption. Gender also correlated positively with the intention to sign up and participate in the meat free week. Therefore, gender was taken as a control variable in the analyses. Another result of this analysis was the correlation between the answers on the stages of change. These correlations showed logical patterns. The contemplation and the preparation questions correlated positively with each other and between these stages and the

pre-contemplation questions was found a negative correlation. This makes sense because a high score on pre-contemplation questions means participants were not willing to change at all and a high score on contemplation and preparation questions means they were more willing to change their behaviour. Finally, the pre-contemplation scores correlated negatively with the intention, which means that the higher they scored on the pre-contemplation questions, the lower their intention to reduce meat consumption. On the other hand, when they were more willing to change, they were also more intended to sign up for the petition. The correlation scores can be found in appendix B.

Main analysis

The total conceptual model was tested with the PROCESS Macro model of Hayes (appendix D). Model 7 (moderated mediation) was performed to test the conceptual model and model 1 (moderation) was used for the extra analysis. This extra analysis was performed without the variable motivated attention. As mentioned earlier, gender was taken as a control variable in these analyses. A regression analysis was also used to give a clear overview of the

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Independent variable: disgust

To check whether disgust had an effect on the intention to reduce meat consumption, the PROCESS model of Hayes (model 7) was performed. This model showed that there was a direct positive effect of disgust on people’s intention to sign up for a meat free week (B = 1.03, t(3.81), p = .02). This indicates that seeing the disgusting image made participants more willing to sign up and participate in the meat free week. Descriptive statistics showed that participants in the experimental (disgusting) condition scored on average 4.63 (SD = 1.88) on the intention to sign up and participate in the meat free week and in the control condition the average score was 3.90 (SD = 2.18). When the willingness to eat a hamburger was used in order to measure intention, there was found a negative relation between disgust and the willingness to eat a hamburger (B = -.58, t(-1.51), p = .13). This result implies that seeing the disgusting image made participants less inclined to eat a hamburger. However, this result was not significant.

Because gender correlated with intention (appendix B), the differences between intention to reduce meat consumption for women versus men were tested with an ANOVA analysis. Women were significantly more intended to sign up and participate in the meat free week (N = 88, M = 4.78, SD = 1.92) than men (N = 48, M = 3.31, SD = 1.98) (F(1, 17.84) p = .00). This might also have to do with the fact that women were more willing to reduce their meat consumption before they got exposed to the manipulation (Mwomen = 4.71, SD = 1.25 , Mmen =

3.73, SD = 1.61) (F(1, 29.78) p = .00). 4, 63 3, 9 D I S G U S T C O N T R O L I N T E N T I O N T O S I G N U P F O R T H E M E A T F R E E W E E K

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The mediating effect

Model 7 of Hayes showed that participants looked significantly longer at the disgusting image than at the control image (B = 6.99, t(9.75) p = .00). The expectations were that the intention to reduce meat consumption was higher when motivated attention was higher. In other words: when people accepted the disgusting message and thus looked longer at the image, they were more intended to change their behaviour. So, there was expected a positive effect. However, the analysis proved the opposite. There was found a negative effect of motivated attention on the intention to sign up for the meat free week (B = -.06, t(-1.35), p = .18). This negative effect implies that the longer people looked at the disgusting image, the lower the intention was to reduce meat consumption and this contradicts the expected results. Nonetheless, this negative effect was not found to be significant. Looking at the results including outliers, there was found a negative significant effect (appendix C).

As mentioned before, the two questions that measured intention were not combined into one scale because the Cronbach’s α was not high enough (< .70). The focus of the analyses is on the question about the meat free week. As already mentioned in the methods, for transparency reasons the results of the other intention question will also be presented. When the same analysis was performed with the question if they would like to eat a hamburger, different results were found. There was found a small positive effect of motivated attention on the intention to eat a hamburger right now. This positive effect would imply that the longer they looked at the image, the more they would like to eat a hamburger. However, this effect was by no means significant (B = .01, t(-.27), p = .79).

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Willingness to change

The three stages of change could not have been taken together because they all measured something different. A high score on pre-contemplation questions meant that they were not willing to change and a high score on preparation questions meant that they were willing to change. For the analyses in this section the preparation stage was used as moderator.

The preparation stage (e.g. I am willing to actively work on reducing my meat consumption) was used as the main moderator because this stage was the most appropriate to use. The pre-contemplation questions (e.g. there is nothing I really need to change about my meat

consumption pattern) showed when people were not willing to change. For the contemplation questions (e.g. Sometimes I wonder if eating less meat would be better), it was not by

definition the case that the higher participants scored, the more willing they were to change. When they scored low, it could also be the case that they were very willing to change and therefore agreed less with the contemplation stage statements. Therefore, the preparation stage was the best to use: the higher they scored, the more willing to change. Besides, the

Cronbach’s α of the three preparation questions were the highest of all stages (.94). The variance in the answers on the preparation questions was also the highest with 2.13 (SD = 1.46), where the variance of the pre-contemplation and contemplation questions were respectively 1.52 (SD = 1.23) and 1.43 (SD = 1.20).

First, the relationship between willingness to change and the intention to sign up for the meat free week was analysed. Because willingness to change is a continuous variable, a regression analysis was performed. There has been found a positive significant effect of the willingness to change on the intention to reduce meat consumption (B = .63, t(5.82) p = .00). In other words, the more willing to change participants were to change, the more likely they were to sign up for the meat free week. Again, to be transparent, the regression analysis was also performed with the intention question ‘I would like to eat a hamburger right now’. Using these scores, there was found a significant effect as well (B = -.34, t(3.42) p = .00). This implies that participants who were more willing to change were less inclined to eat a hamburger at that moment.

The moderating effect

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1.88) p = .06). When they scored higher on the preparation questions; so when they were more willing to change, participants looked shorter to either the experimental or the control message. This result is contradicting the expected positive moderating effect and therefore H2 cannot be accepted. Additionally, when outliers were included, there was even a more

significant effect (appendix C). This remarkable result implies that people who were more willing to change were more intended to avoid the message. Because this totally contradicts the theory, an extra analysis was performed.

Extra analysis

The question arises if motivated attention was measured in an appropriate way. It was measured in a way that the longer participants looked at the message, the more they engage with the message. Since motivated attention could have been the reason for these

contradicting results, there was also performed a separate moderation analysis without motivated attention. Therefore, the outliers of motivated attention were included in the

analysis again. A moderation analysis was performed with model 1 and willingness to change was used as the moderator. The goal of this analysis was to find out whether willingness to change strengthened the effect of disgust on the intention to reduce meat consumption. So, predicted was that when people are more willing to change, the effect of disgust on the intention is also stronger. However, another significant negative effect was found (B = -.413, t(-1.96), p = .05). The willingness to change negatively moderated the effect of disgust on the intention to reduce meat consumption. In other words, when people were more willing to change, the effect of disgust on intention became weaker. It can therefore be concluded that disgust had a less strong effect on people who were more willing to change their meat consumption. So, disgust might work better with people who are less willing to change. Below, the conceptual model can be found with the coefficients (B-values) of the effects.

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DISCUSSION

Findings

Meat consumption is a solidified behaviour in our society and the environment is suffering from this consumption behaviour. The main goal of this study was to explore whether disgust could help in reducing meat consumption. It was investigated if people’s willingness to change influenced the strength of disgust. So, has disgust a more convincing effect when people are already intended to change their behaviour? Additionally, this research

investigated if a disgusting message has to be accepted before this message can have an effect on people’s intention to change a habit like meat consumption.

Different researchers (de Hoog et al., 2007; Nabi, 1998; Lerner et al., 2004) found that disgust can also have a negative effect on people’s intention to behave in a more ethical way.

However, this study showed that disgust had a direct positive effect on people’s intention to reduce meat consumption. Contradicting to the expectations, this study found that the longer participants looked at the disgusting image, the lower their score on the intention to reduce meat consumption. Though, this effect was only significant when outliers were included. These results seem contradictory and the question arises if motivated attention was measured in an appropriate way. Overall, these opposite and confusing results indicate that measuring the duration in seconds was not the right way to measure motivated attention.

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change. It seems that people who already wanted to change their behaviour did probably not want to see the disgusting message. Disgust only made them less intended to reduce meat consumption. Different explanations of these contradicting results will be discussed in the limitations.

Limitations

Firstly, the intention had be measured with two questions. However, only the question if they would sign the petition was used because the Cronbach’s α of the two questions together was too low. Results were therefore presented by showing the output of both questions. There are a few reasons why these questions may not have measured the same. The question if they would like to eat a hamburger right now might also be influenced by the time of the day participants filled in the survey and therefore measured something different than the question about the petition. When it is early in the morning, it is less likely you want to eat a

hamburger, but when you do the study right before dinner and you are very hungry, you definitely want to eat the hamburger. Besides, some people will love hamburgers and others are on a diet so they are not allowed to eat them. The answer to the question if they would sign the petition and join the meat free week may also be influenced. People might not like petitions at all or they do not want to commit themselves to whatever it will be. To conclude, it is important to ask more questions that measure intention in order to gain reliable data.

Secondly, as mentioned before, the variable motivated attention might have caused problems. Logically reasoned, there is no linear relationship between message acceptance and the number of seconds that people look at a message. Motivated attention was measured in a way that ‘the longer they look at the message, the ‘more’ they accept the message’. However, people might have accepted the message when they have looked five seconds at a disgusting image, but they also accepted it when they looked 20 seconds at the image. So, when do you really avoid a message and when do you accept it? This turned out being hard to measure via a survey on the computer. Additionally, when people avoid a message, they might turn their head away. This means the time they looked at the image will not be necessarily shorter. The time they spent on the page of the message can be even longer because they move their head away from the image and will not click further directly.

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process information that is consistent with their existing goals and that high involvement increases persuasion (Downar et al., 2002; Petty & Cacioppo, 1979; Simons & Chabris 1999; Yoon & Tinkham, 1986). That willingness to change had a negative moderating effect on the relation between disgust and intention may be caused by willful ignorance. People sometimes want to avoid negative emotions and choose to not expose themselves to information that will lead to these negative emotions. (Ehrich & Irwin, 2005). Individuals are sometimes ‘willfully ignorant’ about their ethical beliefs. This means that they ignore or avoid relevant information (Zane, Irwin, Reczek, 2013). A disgusting message is probably more relevant to people who are more willing to change their meat consumption. Therefore, these people may be more likely to create negative emotions towards this disgusting message. They simply do not want to have these negative emotions and that might have resulted in a less positive effect of disgust. Thus, people who were more willing to change in this study were possibly willfully ignorant about the ethical beliefs they had about meat.

To conclude, it could be the case that participants who were more willing to change, did not want to expose themselves to negative emotions. When they do not see the disgusting image, they will feel better. This might have happened with the participants who felt more engaged and involved with the ethical issues of meat consumption. Another reason for this

contradicting finding might be that people who were more intended to change their behaviour did not need to see the disgusting image. This may be because they already had negative emotions towards meat consumption and they do not want to emphasize this even more by looking at the disgusting image. These negative emotions needed to be prevented because they were already convinced of reducing their meat consumption. They were already motivated and did not want to see the images because it touches them too much.

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low, which means they did not agree with typical pre-contemplator statements. From these results can be concluded that gender is very important to take into account in anti-meat consumption campaigns.

Implications

Despite no hypotheses could be confirmed in this study, there were found contradicting and (marginally) significant results. It gives marketers more knowledge and insight into the use of disgust when they want to change people’s behaviour. The direct positive effect of disgust on intention shows that it works to show disgusting images in meat reducing campaigns.

However, marketers need to be cautious. The effect of disgust might possibly get weaker when people are more willing to change meat consumption. Therefore, knowing in what stage of change your target group is, is relevant when designing an anti-meat consumption

campaign. For marketers, it is important to know their target group very well. When people are already in a later stage of change it might not be the best choice to use disgust. Besides, an important notice is that people look longer at a disgusting image than at a non-disgusting image. This is probably because they are fascinated by what they see. However, when they looked longer, they were not per se more intended to reduce their meat consumption. Marketers therefore have to know that it is not necessary that people get fascinated and fascination might even reduce the effectiveness of the campaign.

Future research

For future research it is important that the reason for the contradicting findings is going to be researched more in depth. As discussed in the limitations there are several reasons that could explain these findings. Was it due to the research design or did the willing participants just not want to see the disgusting image? To tackle the first, the research design must be changed. For future research it would be better to test motivated attention in a lab. When such research would be performed in a lab, the researcher has the possibility to use an ‘eye gaze tracking device’ (EGTs). These devices can estimate the direction of gaze of participants (Morimoto & Mimica, 2005). As a researcher, you can see where they are exactly looking at on the

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image. Another way to measure motivated attention is by observing participants. With observation, researchers can see the expressions on their faces as well.

According to the measurement of the willingness to change, there are some suggestions for future research as well. The willingness to change was measured with questions that belonged to three different stages of change. In the end, only the questions about the preparation stage were used and therefore a lot of data was lost. For future research it would be better to focus on one stage and maybe ask more different questions, in order to increase reliability and validity.

Finally, further research should focus on disgust and what really makes it an effective tool to use in anti-meat consumption campaigns. There are still remaining unclarities and

contradicting theories about the differences between either involved or not-involved people and the effect of disgust. For example, the theory about willful ignorance could be interesting to use when performing a new study. So, are people who are more willing to reduce meat consumption also more willfully ignorant towards negative information about meat relating topics or disgusting images of meat?

Conclusion

The goal of this paper was to offer insight into the effects of disgusting messages on reducing meat consumption. Meat consumption is anchored in our system and it is hard to break this habit. Therefore, disgust was chosen as a manipulator, since literature showed that this emotion may help with creating negative associations towards risky or unethical behaviour. This research showed evidence for the fact that showing disgusting messages can really help people with changing unethical behaviour like meat consumption. It was expected that people who were more willing to reduce their meat consumption, were also more positive towards a disgusting image, but this was not the case. Disgust had less effect on people who were more willing to reduce their meat consumption. It might be the case that these people did not want to feel negative emotions and therefore moved away from issues they care about. Another explanation would be that people were already convinced, so they did not need to see the disgusting image to get convinced.

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APPENDICES

Appendix A: The survey

Dear participant,

Thanks for participating! I am writing my master thesis and I am interested in understanding consumption behaviour.  

This study should take you about five minutes to complete.   Your participation in this research is voluntary and you have the right to withdraw at any point during the study. If you have any questions related to this research, please e-mail n.l.kester@student.rug.nl.

By clicking the button below, you acknowledge that your participation in the study is voluntary and you are at least 18 years of age. Please be assured that your responses on the questions will be kept completely

confidential. 

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fact 1 Did you know a single can of Coca Cola contains 10 teaspoons of sugar?

fact 2 Did you know Dutch people drink 7 liters of pure alcohol each year?

fact 3 Did you know a single donut will meet your maximum allowance of sugar for the whole day?

fact 4 Did you know 700 million kilograms of food is thrown away by households in the Netherlands each

year and most of it could be eaten?

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fact 5 Did you know over 1/3 of all food produced globally goes to waste?

fact 6 Did you know each year almost 800 Dutch people younger than 18 years old end up in an alcoholic

coma?

control condition Did you know MacDonalds sells 75 hamburgers every second of the

day?

Disgust condition Did you know butchers often do not cut tumours out of animals in the slaughter house and

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Consume Please indicate to what extent the following statements are applicable to you Strongly disagree Disagree Somewhat disagree Neither agree nor disagree Somewhat agree Agree Strongly agree I would like to eat a hamburger right now

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I would like to drink a beer or a glass of wine right now

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I would like to eat a donut right now

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I would like to drink a can of Coca Cola right now

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Meat free week

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46 Appendix B: Correlation table

Variables Gender Age Education WTC PC WTC C WTC P Intention Motivated

attention Gender _x Age _.006 _x Education _-.018 _.057 _x WTC PC _{-.314** .056} _-.176* _x WTC C _.333** _-.013 _.134 _{-.706** x} WTC P _.323** _-.016 _.168 _{-.614** .868**} _x Intention _.343** _-.022 _.067 _{-.464** .455**} _.511** _x Motivated attention .061 .038 -.147 .043 -.007 -.090 -.044 x

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47 Appendix C: Results including outliers

(N = 136)

The PROCESS macro model of Hayes, model 7 showed:

- A significant positive effect of disgust on people’s intention to sign up for a meat free week (B = 1.12, t(2.69), p = .01).

- Participants looked significantly longer at the disgusting image than to the control image (B = 8.22, t(9.51) p = .00).

- A significant negative effect of motivated attention on the intention to sign up for the meat free week (B = -.07, t(-2.30), p = .02).

- A significant negative effect of willingness to change on the effect of disgust on motivated attention (B = -1.48, t(-2.47) p = .01).

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48 Appendix D: SPSS output model 7 of Hayes

Run MATRIX procedure:

************* PROCESS Procedure for SPSS Release 2.16.3 ****************** Written by Andrew F. Hayes, Ph.D. www.afhayes.com

************************************************************************** Model = 7 Y = Intentio X = Conditio M = Total_ti W = MC_P Statistical Controls: CONTROL= Gender Sample size 131 ************************************************************************** Outcome: Total_ti Model Summary R R-sq MSE F df1 df2 p ,6610 ,4369 16,2752 24,4426 4,0000 126,0000 ,0000 Model

coeff se t p LLCI ULCI constant 4,6716 1,3407 3,4844 ,0007 2,0184 7,3249 Conditio 6,9865 ,7169 9,7457 ,0000 5,5678 8,4052 MC_P -,0322 ,3277 -,0983 ,9218 -,6807 ,6162 int_1 -,9372 ,4981 -1,8815 ,0622 -1,9229 ,0485 Gender -,3548 ,7834 -,4529 ,6514 -1,9051 1,1955 Product terms key:

int_1 Conditio X MC_P ************************************************************************** Outcome: Intentio Model Summary R R-sq MSE F df1 df2 p ,3960 ,1568 3,6235 7,8745 3,0000 127,0000 ,0001 Model

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Direct effect of X on Y

Effect SE t p LLCI ULCI 1,0320 ,4374 2,3594 ,0198 ,1665 1,8975 Conditional indirect effect(s) of X on Y at values of the moderator(s): Mediator

MC_P Effect Boot SE BootLLCI BootULCI Total_ti -1,4446 -,4606 ,3246 -1,1077 ,1811 Total_ti ,0241 -,3846 ,2701 -,9020 ,1605 Total_ti 1,4927 -,3086 ,2252 -,7726 ,1122

Values for quantitative moderators are the mean and plus/minus one SD from mean.

Values for dichotomous moderators are the two values of the moderator. ******************** INDEX OF MODERATED MEDIATION ************************ Mediator

Index SE(Boot) BootLLCI BootULCI Total_ti ,0518 ,0486 -,0109 ,1977

******************** ANALYSIS NOTES AND WARNINGS ************************* Number of bootstrap samples for bias corrected bootstrap confidence

intervals: 5000

Level of confidence for all confidence intervals in output: 95,00

NOTE: Some cases were deleted due to missing data. The number of such cases was:

5

Are You Motivated to Break the Habit?

Are You Motivated to Break the Habit?

The Effect of Disgust on Reducing Meat Consumption

Are You Motivated to Break the Habit?

The Effect of Disgust on Reducing Meat Consumption

ABSTRACT

PREFACE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

METHODOLOGY

RESULTS

DISCUSSION

REFERENCES

APPENDICES

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