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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1439641
This article is part of the Research Topic How Do Behavior Science Interventions to Reduce Environmental Impacts Work in The Real World? View all 18 articles
Reducing Meat Consumption through Default Nudging: A Field Study
Provisionally accepted- 1 Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Gelderland, Netherlands
- 2 Urban and Environmental Psychology Group, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Meat consumption negatively impacts ecological sustainability, health, and animal welfare.Research suggested promising effects of re-designing product arrangements so that vegetarian items become the default. However, whether default nudging leads to actual behaviour change in the context of meat consumption, and whether these effects are sustainable on the longterm remains unknown. Therefore, this field experiment investigated (a) the effect of vegetarian default nudging on food choices in a real-life setting, and (b) potential long-term associations between vegetarian defaults, food choices, and psychological resistance (i.e., reactance and inertia). A vegetarian default intervention was applied in a university cafeteria.Behavioural data (cafeteria sales data regarding meat and vegetarian purchases; N = 4099) was collected before (T0; baseline), right after implementation (T1), and 10 weeks after implementation of the intervention (T2). Additionally, survey data was collected at T1 and T2 to assess potential psychological side-effects, such as resistance to the intervention. Results indicate that vegetarian default nudging was highly effective at changing food choices, with more than twice the number of vegetarian items sold relative to baseline. Moreover, in the default nudging condition, the number of meat items decreased to less than a third of the baseline measurement. At the same time, the survey data revealed no psychological sideeffect of the intervention on reactance or inertia. This was stable over time. Our research offers empirical support for the effectiveness of a non-coercive strategy to change consumer behaviour towards more sustainable, animal friendly, and healthier food choices.
Keywords: default nudging, Intervention research, meat consumption, Environmental impact, Behaviour Change
Received: 28 May 2024; Accepted: 27 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ardesch, Klaperski-van Der Wal, Nijssen and Müller. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Sari R.R. Nijssen, Urban and Environmental Psychology Group, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
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