Boosting sustainable food consumption with personalised motivational matching Learn about TealHelix, an international research initiative addressing how to turn positive sustainability motivation into food choices. TealHelix proposes a new approach to sustainable food consumption: empowering consumers through inclusive personalised information. Building on motivational matching, (1) the project develops innovative labelling formats and digital social innovations that guide real-world decision-making while addressing consumer vulnerability and resistance. By integrating life cycle, social, economic, and behavioural insights, TealHelix creates tools to align individual and planetary preferences. The project tests multiple transmission channels and formulates integrity guidelines and information standards for the industry. Using interdisciplinary expertise and advanced empirical methods, TealHelix ultimately aims to enhance trust, comprehension, and engagement with sustainability information across Europe.

Purpose: Walking is both one of the most accessible ways to meet physical activity goals, while also being a very sustainable urban mobility form. Whether or not people walk is closely tied to the perceived quality of the walking environment, commonly referred to as walkability. While previous research has identified various key determinants of perceived walkability, including security, traffic safety, infrastructure, and environmental features, the role of seasonal variation remains underexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring perceived walkability changes from summer to autumn. Methods: During the summer and autumn (2024), we interviewed 229 pedestrians in two streets in Leuven using the participatory tool ‘Walkability App’ (Walk21). The reported experiences were allocated into pre-existing categories of walking experiences within the Walkability App and were allocated into positive and negative clusters. To assess the changes between the seasons, we compared the differences between the experiences collected in summer and in autumn on the key dimensions mentioned above. Results: First, using ordinal logistic regression, we compared the differences in perceived security between the seasons. We uncovered a significant decline in the main effect of perceived security during autumn compared to summer (odds ratio (OR) = 0.277; 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.101, 0.710]) as well as a significant interaction between season and time of the day (OR = 0.195; 95% CI [0.049, 0.795]), indicating the lack of safety specifically during the evening in autumn. Second, we found a significant interaction between season and time of the day for the item ‘missing lighting, seating, or ramps’, showing an increased endorsement of this item during the evening in autumn (OR= 4.816; 95% CI [1.282, 21.161]). Third, contrary to our expectations, we found no significant change in pedestrian volume (i.e. people walking) between the seasons using the Quasi-Poisson Regression analysis (p > .05). Finally, walking enjoyment significantly declined in autumn compared to summer (p = 0.047). Conclusion: The study emphasises the need to take into account seasonal variations. For practitioners and policymakers specifically, the results highlight opportunities to design more adaptive, seasonally responsive streets, particularly through improving lighting and the perceived safety, to also support walking in darker seasons.

This study investigates the role of loyalty programs in promoting the circular economy and sustainable consumption within second-hand markets, focusing on the clothing and electronics sectors. With growing environmental concerns driving a resurgence in second-hand shopping, the study examines how marketing strategies, especially loyalty programs, can enhance consumer engagement in these markets. The study comprises two high-powered online experiments conducted with Western European participants. Participants were exposed to different loyalty program scenarios: a classic reward system for purchases, an integrated reward system for purchases and donations, and a control group with no loyalty program. The findings reveal that while loyalty programs significantly enhance the intention to repurchase, they can paradoxically decrease the intention to donate, potentially undermining intrinsic prosocial motivations. The findings underscore the need for a balanced approach in implementing loyalty programs to foster both repurchasing and prosocial behaviours, ultimately supporting the transition to a more sustainable economy.

Background: Professional sports clubs increasingly need to pay attention to, and are evaluated on, their corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR refers to an organisation’s commitment to operate in an ethical and sustainable manner to contribute positively to society, beyond profit-making and success on the field. A crucial dimension of CSR refers to the environmental impact of the clubs’ activities. One way in which sports clubs can reduce their negative ecological effects is to motivate their fans to come to the games in a physically active way (e.g. by walking or cycling to the venue). Methods: In preparation of the interventions to promote active mobility to the stadium, we surveyed 899 fans of OH Leuven, a professional football team in the Belgium first-division, located in a small-sized university city. The main research aim was to explore the relations between fans’ mobility behaviours and their perceived importance and evaluation of environmental CSR. Results: The results revealed that about half of the fans reported coming to the stadium by means of active mobility: 42.3% by bike and 8.0% on foot (vs. 10.6% by public transportation, 35.8% by car, 3.3% by other means). Overall, fans agreed with the statement that it was important that their club acted in a pro-environmental way (mean (M) = 4.00, standard deviation (SD) = 0.82) on a 5-point Likert scale) and that their club was currently sufficiently acting in a pro-environmental way (M = 3.86, SD = 0.71). Interestingly, active and passive mobility fans did not differ in terms of their perceived importance of environmental CSR. However, active mobility fans were slightly less satisfied with the current environmental actions of their club. Conclusions: The findings further indicated that the active mobility behaviour of fans was mainly determined by more pragmatic reasons (e.g. distance of home to the stadium: M = 4.73 km for the active mobility fans vs. 15.87 km for the passive mobility fans). Interestingly, more than 33% of car-using fans lived less than 10 km from the stadium (14% even 5 km or less), suggesting that interventions to promote cycling should target these fans.

Although virtual agents are being used more and more in our everyday lives, one barrier to effective interaction with digital human avatars is the way they express emotions. While emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust are central to human communication, when displayed by avatars they may undermine rather than enhance trust. Researchers have thus been exploring ways to endow virtual agents with human characteristics, such as the ability to express humanlike emotions. However, very little research has been done on how humans react to virtual agents displaying emotions. This paper investigates how emotional expressiveness in digital human avatars affects users' trust and subsequent intention to use apps across health and tourism contexts. We conducted three experimental studies to test the effect of the expression of emotions on trust toward virtual agents: specifically digital human avatars. We find that—contrary to generalized belief—the expression of emotions has a negative effect on the intention to use an app featuring a digital human avatar. Moreover, we demonstrate that this negative impact on the intention to use such an app is mediated by the reduced trust in the emotional digital human avatar. Finally, accounting for consumers' individual differences, we provide evidence that this mediated relationship is further moderated by some individuals' tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman agents. Specifically, the negative indirect effect of digital human avatars' emotionality display on intention to use an app through experience and trust drives intentionality only for individuals with lower anthropomorphism tendencies.

Understanding the determinants of healthy and unhealthy food choices is paramount to improving public health. This paper zooms in on the role of evaluation mode (i.e., separate versus joint evaluation) in consumers' food choices. A series of four studies in the paper and four studies in the online appendix (N = 2024) investigate the effect of evaluation mode on the choice share of healthy and unhealthy foods. In line with earlier work in various domains, the results demonstrate that joint evaluation of healthy and unhealthy food options improves consumers' decisionmaking by decreasing (increasing) the choice share of unhealthy (healthy) food, compared to the separate evaluation mode. We show that this relies on the simple fact that the healthiness attribute is difficult to judge in isolation, certainly in comparison with the taste attribute. Indeed, when healthiness becomes easier to evaluate, unhealthy choices become more frequent in the joint evaluation mode as well. The studies are set up to allow us to distinguish the evaluability account from the justification and the goal-highlighting accounts. The theoretical contributions, the methodological implications for the self-control literature, and the managerial implications are discussed.

Embodied virtual agents (EVAs) are beginning to be researched to improve human–computer interaction. As EVAs become increasingly integrated into various aspects of daily life, understanding how to optimize their design to foster trust and likability among users is paramount. Leveraging insights from social psychology, particularly the concept of homophily, this study investigates the impact of perceived personality traits on user perceptions of EVAs. Specifically, we explore whether aligning the personality traits of EVAs with those of users increases engagement and fosters positive interactions. Drawing on a sample of 382 participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, we assessed participants' personality traits using the Big Five Inventory—2S, while the perceived extroversion of the agent was manipulated through facial expressions and body posture. Our findings suggest that participants were able to accurately identify the perceived extroversion of the agent (p = .014), and significant results indicate a homophily effect on trust, with participants exhibiting greater trust in agents perceived as having a similar level of extroversion (p < .01). However, no significant effect on likability was detected, suggesting a more nuanced relationship between perceived personality traits and user preferences. These findings highlight the potential of leveraging homophily in designing more engaging EVAs and underscore the importance of considering user–agent compatibility in human–computer interaction.

The enduring availability of high-caloric, tempting food in consumer environments has been identified as a major cause driving the obesity epidemic. The severity of the problem tends to hide the important fact that many consumers often resist food temptations. This article aims at designing consumption reduction strategies that build on the spontaneous capacity of consumers to resist food temptations. Across a series of three experiments, of which two laboratory studies and one field study, we find that physical exposure to food temptations reduces subsequent free consumption of similar foods. Building on cognitive control theory, we extend this finding and identify boundary conditions. We show that the reduction of consumption works in challenging populations (e.g., men and children) with pictures of food temptations and that it survives a delay. We also show that the effect is suppressed with explicit prohibition during pre-exposure and with combined exposure (i.e., the combination of physical and picture temptations) in children. The findings are discussed concerning their potential as a social marketing tool.

Much of what consumers eat is selected by other people, making it essential to understand how individuals make food choices for others. This research addresses the gap by applying construal level theory, proposing that as the social distance between the food decision-maker and the recipient increases, consumers prioritize health attributes (abstract construal level attribute) over taste attributes (concrete construal level attribute) of food. Eight experiments in both laboratory and real dining settings demonstrate that greater recipient distance shifts focus toward higher-construal attributes, such as health, resulting in healthier choices, while reduced distance shifts attention toward taste attributes, leading to tastier selections. These findings broaden our understanding of food choice, extending the perspective from self decision-making to agent decision-making, uncovering the psychological processes involved in choosing food for oneself versus for others. Marketers and policymakers can apply these insights to encourage healthier food choice by designing situations that promote food choices for others.

Energy communities (ECs) offer a promising solution for achieving sustainable and decentralized energy systems. However, the successful establishment and operation of ECs requires overcoming barriers that can hinder stakeholder participation. Existing research has primarily focused on incentives and motivations to join ECs, thus neglecting a comprehensive understanding of the key barriers affecting EC stakeholders in European Union (EU) countries. This paper aims to fill this research gap by identifying and ranking the barriers to joining ECs in the EU context with focus on Spain and Italy. To accomplish this, a framework of barriers was developed based on 20 in-depth interviews with diverse stakeholders of established ECs and a survey (n=56). The barriers identified were categorized into four types: (a) financial, (b) regulatory and bureaucratic, (c) technical and practical, and (d) social and cultural. The analytical hierarchical process (AHP) methodology was employed to estimate and rank these barriers. The findings highlight that the most significant barrier categories are regulatory and bureaucratic, and financial. Specifically, regulatory complexity and legal limitations emerge as the top-ranked barriers among the obstacles identified to joining ECs by research participants.

Art experts generally perceive, process, and appreciate artworks differently from non-experts. Here we explored whether animacy of the content and prestige of the context of artworks matter to experts. Results (n > 1,000) suggest that experts are indeed swayed by prestige cues when appreciating artworks. Furthermore, the higher their expertise, the less animacy matters, to the point even of a reversal among the highest echelons. There experts prefer inanimate (e.g., furniture) to animate stimuli. We consider several, mostly complementary explanations. One interpretation is that experts might have learned through prestige bias to reduce their preference for animacy, which would be consistent with a prestige bias runaway process. Other interpretations include processing perceptual (dis)fluency, cognitive mastering, and identity signaling. Irrespective of the precise roles of these compatible processes, the results might point to a more general expertise-dependent pattern. We close by discussing further research opportunities to further fine-tune possible explanations.

Reductions in residential energy demand (especially by high-consuming households) are critical for climate change mitigation. Interventions that inform people about their energy use and its consequences may encourage them to reduce energy consumption, but such informational interventions have not always been found to be effective. In addition, little is known about the factors that determine the effectiveness of informational interventions. Here, we examined the effect of an informational intervention campaign on household energy use (electricity and gas) in Mechelen, Belgium. Neighborhoods were randomized to different variants of the intervention that emphasized the monetary, environmental, or monetary and environmental consequences of saving energy. Across a three-year study period, we observed significantly larger reductions (two additional percentage points) in gas consumption in the intervention city than in four comparable control cities. This effect was largely driven by reductions in neighborhoods with high baseline levels of gas consumption. No substantial changes were found between neighborhoods that received monetary information, environmental information, or both. Our findings support the effectiveness of informational interventions for the reduction of energy use, point to the special role of high-consuming households, and can inform the design of future intervention campaigns.

In recent decades, reports of deforestation, mass extinctions, biodiversity loss, and emergencies like floods and droughts have clearly highlighted the impact of human activities on climate change. This underscores the need for significant lifestyle changes to mitigate this impact. Pro-environmental behavior (PEB) change involves adopting actions that protect the environment and reducing environmentally harmful activities to promote sustainability. While qualitative research may provide unique insights into PEB barriers that are challenging to capture through quantitative methods, reports of qualitative studies are scattered across different literatures with little integration. With the present review, we bring together qualitative studies on PEB barriers and examine whether those studies reveal barriers compatible with existing barrier frameworks from environmental psychology. We identified 38 qualitative studies on barriers to PEB change. Our analysis revealed that most of the barriers to individual pro-environmental action identified in qualitative studies align with environmental psychology frameworks. These barriers were experienced not only by individuals in their role as consumer or citizen, but also by community-level actors (e.g., seeking to implement pro-environmental policies) and industrial decision-makers (e.g., aiming to reduce the ecological footprint of their business activities). Our findings underscore the multifaceted nature of barriers to PEB change and emphasize the importance of addressing structural and institutional factors alongside individual-level interventions.

Download This Paper Open PDF in Browser Add Paper to My Library Share: Permalink Using these links will ensure access to this page indefinitely Copy URL Copy DOI

Download This Paper Open PDF in Browser Add Paper to My Library Share: Permalink Using these links will ensure access to this page indefinitely Copy URL On the Correlation between Pro-Environmental Behavior Self-Reports and Behavioralparadigms 12 Pages Posted: 26 Feb 2024 See all articles by Sarah DelcourtSarah DelcourtKU LeuvenFlorian LangeKU Leuvensiegfried dewitteKU Leuven Abstract A core question in behavioral science is whether individuals who are more likely to engage in one particular pro-environmental behavior are also more likely to engage in other pro-environmental behaviors. Prior self-report research found weakly to moderately correlated individuals differences in different pro-environmental behaviors, but correlations between self-reported behaviors may be produced by factors other than truly correlated engagement likelihoods. In the current study (N = 135), we examined the relation among a unique set of 13 self-reported pro-environmental behaviors and observed engagements in three laboratory pro-environmental behavior tasks that vary in the degree they have been validated in prior work. Our results confirm that self-reported engagement likelihoods in some pro-environmental behaviors are moderately correlated, whereas correlations among the observed behaviors and between self-reported and observed behaviors were mostly weak and not consistently positive. These findings suggest that only some pro-environmental behaviors share interindividual variance and that an individual’s pro-environmental propensity or preference may not manifest in all behaviors that are commonly considered pro-environmental. Keywords: Pro-environmental Behavior, behavior change, self-report, laboratory paradigm, correlation Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation Delcourt, Sarah and Lange, Florian and dewitte, siegfried, On the Correlation between Pro-Environmental Behavior Self-Reports and Behavioralparadigms. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4739550 Sarah Delcourt (Contact Author) KU Leuven ( email ) Oude Markt 13Leuven, 3000Belgium Florian Lange KU Leuven ( email ) Oude Markt 13Leuven, 3000Belgium Siegfried Dewitte KU Leuven ( email ) Download This Paper Open PDF in Browser Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share? Submit Negative Results Paper statistics Downloads 0 Abstract Views 11 28 References PlumX Metrics Feedback Feedback to SSRN Feedback (required) Email (required) Submit If you need immediate assistance, call 877-SSRNHelp (877 777 6435) in the United States, or +1 212 448 2500 outside of the United States, 8:30AM to 6:00PM U.S. Eastern, Monday - Friday.

While non-monetary reinforcement is often discussed as a promising intervention technique, systematic research on its effectiveness for the promotion of pro-environmental behavior has been scarce. This lack of research is likely due to the difficulty of studying non-monetary reinforcement within existing study designs. Here, we examined the effects of non-monetary reinforcement using a recently developed and validated pro-environmental behavior task. In two preregistered studies (total N = 997), participants could repeatedly choose to exert actual effort in exchange for donations to an environmental organization. Their choices were either followed by potentially reinforcing stimuli (e.g., words of praise superimposed on positively valenced pictures) or not. When accompanied by cheerful animal pictures, these stimuli significantly promoted pro -environmental effort expenditure in Study 2, but not in Study 1. Longer-term effects and spill-over to non-reinforced behavior were also examined, but not conclusively supported. These findings illustrate the potential of the presented experimental approach for studying the effec-tiveness of non-monetary reinforcement in societally relevant domains.

Are attention issues disorders or not? Philosophers of medicine have tried to address this question by looking for properties that distinguish disorders from non-disorders. Such properties include deviation of a statistical norm, a loss of function or experienced suffering. However, attempts at such conceptual analysis have not led to a consensus on the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of disorder. Recently, philosophers have proposed an experimental approach to investigate in which circumstances people think a specific concept is applicable. Here we present a quantitative vignette study investigating whether disorder attribution depends on the perceived cause and the perceived type of treatment for an attention problem. The results of our study indicate that the attribution of a disorder decreased when the attention problem was understood as caused by bullying (social environmental cause) or by an accident (non-social environmental cause) rather than a genetic cause. When prescribed a pill, attention problems were considered a disorder to a larger extent than when the child was prescribed an environmental treatment. Our study also suggests that whereas successful environmental treatments will not necessarily decrease the disorder attribution, successful pharmacological treatments will decrease the likelihood that a person is thought to still suffer from a disorder after receiving the treatment.

Repairers may play a substantial role in the shift from a linear (make, use, dispose) to a more circular economy, where resources are continually reused and waste is minimized, which is therefore by definition more sustainable. Repaired defective products are usually reused by their owners or may be traded in a second-hand market. A barrier commonly associated with trading is the endowment effect, which is caused by the difference between the maximum amount buyers are willing to pay for a product and the minimum amount sellers are willing to accept for a product. The present study examined whether second-hand market exchanges face an endowment effect, including in situations where the products are broken and repairers are recruited to repair possible defects in the product. An online survey that randomly assigns participants to one of eight experimental conditions (four product types × two buyer/seller statuses) was used for this study. The results show significant endowment effects for intact products and defective products with a repairer involved, but not for defective products. Furthermore, endowment effects occur for different product types. This suggests that sellers may be reluctant to sell their products in terms of the value that buyers would want to pay for them when repairers are easily accessible, which may impede transactions from taking place. The transaction of broken products may be facilitated by designing a system whereby sellers sell broken products to repairers and buyers buy repaired products from repairers.

Pro-environmental behaviors are defined by their consequences, but often studied using inconsequential pro-cedures. The validity problems associated with self-report proxies and hypothetical scenarios can be addressed by studying consequential pro-environmental behavior in behavioral paradigms. Here, we examine the validity of a recently developed paradigm that involves repeated trade-offs between individual and environmental conse-quences. On the Work for Environmental Protection Task (WEPT) participants can make real voluntary efforts to produce actual donations to an environmental organization. Responding to the call for cross-culturally robust methods and insights, we administered the WEPT to residents of the UK, the US, and South Africa (total N = 1175). Preregistered analyses revealed WEPT efforts to be internally consistent, effectively deterred by behav-ioral costs, sensitive to the scope of environmental impact, and correlated to people's general pro-environmental propensity. These results suggest the WEPT to be suited for the experimental analysis of pro-environmental behavior in the investigated populations.

Background Virtual reality (VR) has gained popularity in daily life, and VR food cues seem to elicit food cravings, similar to real food cues. However, little is known about the impact of VR food cues on actual food intake. Objective In real life (RL), exposure to food cues in a situation in which the desire to eat food interferes with the completion of a food-related task reduces the subsequent food intake (ie, the pre-exposure effect). In this study, we examine, on the one hand, whether the pre-exposure effect could be replicated in RL and, on the other hand, whether this effect could be extended to VR contexts. Methods The study used a 2 (stimulus type: food vs nonfood) × 2 (mode: VR vs RL) between-subject design (n=175). Participants were randomly assigned to 1 of the 4 conditions. Results We found the main effect of mode on food intake, with a higher food intake after both VR conditions than after RL conditions (P=.02). In addition, among female participants, we found that exposure to both food cues (ie, VR and RL) resulted in lower food intake than exposure to both nonfood cues (P=.05). In contrast, this effect was not observed among male participants (P=.34). Additionally, VR and RL cues generated similar emotional and behavioral responses (eg, arousal and game difficulty). Conclusions We were unable to replicate the exposure effect in our complete sample. Subgroup analyses, however, showed that for women, exposure to food cues (either in VR or in RL) reduces food intake, indicating that a VR pre-exposure procedure may effectively be applied exclusively for women. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05169996; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05169996