Waste(less): A Psychological Approach Toward Reducing Food Waste

Food waste in the United States is contributing to serious environmental, economic, and social distress. Individual consumers have the potential to combat food waste through a variety of simple mitigation practices. An important unanswered question is what would motivate Americans to waste less food. The current research adapted methods used by Nolan et al. to explore stated motivations for conserving energy. As in the Nolan et al. study, participants were presented with either an information-only message or one of four messages describing a reason to reduce food waste: environmental, financial self interest, social responsibility, and descriptive social norm. In addition, we tested whether the addition of a striking image of food waste made the message more motivating. Different from the case of energy conservation, our participants reported that the financial self-interest message was most motivating. However, the result of this study demonstrated that participants expressed similar motivations to reduce food waste as they did to conserve energy. Future research will examine whether a further pattern found in energy conservation also holds true for reducing food waste: that though people do not express explicit motivation from a social norm message, it has the highest influence on actual behavior.