History Repeats
One of the very first facts drilled into all students of human behavior is the power of past behaviour to predict our future actions. Much of what we do is habitual and, as a result, highly predictable.
This insight is useful to know as a psychologist whose job it is to influence others’ actions because, like ripples in a pond, it means that if we can influence a person’s habits in one area of their lives—be it their diet, finances, or work—there’s a strong probability that this shift will spill over into related behaviors.
Going in Circles
Much research has already explored how these spillover effects can modify peoples’ pro-environmental behavior. For example, if we encourage people to recycle their cans or avoid plastic bags, will these small shifts eventually transfer to bigger decisions, like driving less, taking fewer flights, or reducing ruminant meat?
Yet, with sustainable food choices, some lingering concerns have remained that compensation behaviors might kick in before this positive transfer can happen. A salad at lunch could leave you feeling deprived and so craving a bigger burger at dinner time.
Reinforcing Good Behaviour
So, what’s to be done? How can we ensure behavioral spillover works in our favor when it comes to our food choices?
This was a question that I explored with my two co-authors, David Fecher and Sebastian Isbanner, in a recent study of people’s food choices when ordering online. Our goal was to see how we could leverage past food ordering tendencies to promote more environmentally friendly meal choices in the future.
We asked our study participants to enter into an online food delivery platform and order meal kits for the coming week, selecting their preferred lunch and dinner options for each day. While our “control” group received a generic message about the success of online meal delivery services, our “intervention” group received a short pop-up message just after selecting their daily lunch, which encouraged them to opt for a tasty plant-based dinner.
Published in Appetite, the results from those who initially selected a plant-based lunch were just as we expected; the pop-up message led to a 51 percent increase in the number of veggie dinners that were subsequently ordered by reinforcing our veggie lunch choosers’ self-identity as an “environmentally friendly” (i.e., “morally good”) person.
Dealing With Dissonance
Perhaps more interestingly, however, was the fact that our message still seemed to work on the meaty lunch eaters, even though their past behavior was in the opposite direction. In this case, our message also seemed to influence participants’ self-identity, but this time, by emphasizing the discrepancy between their current actions and the positive identity described in the message.
Becoming aware of this gap between actual behavior and perceived self-image as a morally good person seemed to induce a strong sense of cognitive dissonance—a feeling of mental discomfort—that was sufficient to motivate a 27 percent swing away from meat-based dinners.
With the United States meal kit sector generating around U.S.$5.65bn in 2024, a weekly shift of this magnitude is no small deal.
Future You Is a Click Away
Like all other behaviors, our past actions matter when it comes to food. Yet, as our study shows, our future choices are also not inevitabilities. Meat eaters can still be encouraged to select meat-free options if we push the right influence buttons, especially in the context of online food ordering platforms where changing our behavior to align with our desired self-image is just a click away.
This post also appears on Green Queen Media.