Mind the gap: understanding the drivers of intention-behaviour gaps in the consumption of meat and single-use plastics

Project Information

MINDTHEGAP

Grant agreement ID: 845342

DOI

10.3030/845342

Project terminated on 3 January 2022

EC signature date 11 April 2019

Start date 1 November 2019

End date 4 May 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 184 590,72

EU contribution

€ 184 590,72

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MINDTHEGAP (Mind the gap: understanding the drivers of intention-behaviour gaps in the consumption of meat and single-use plastics)

Reporting period: 2019-11-01 to 2021-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Individual lifestyle change has a vital role to play in mitigating the worst impacts of the climate crisis and addressing many of the other serious environmental challenges the world is currently facing including air pollution and biodiversity loss. Increasingly, many Europeans report intentions to reduce their environmentally damaging consumption behaviours such as the overconsumption of meat and single-use plastics. If converted into actions, these pro-environmental intentions could substantially reduce the harm to the natural environment, and in some cases, such as diet, yield personal benefits as well. Against this backdrop, the action ‘Mind the Gap’ investigates the situational correlates of these environmentally significant consumption behaviours and hones in on how situations predict the behaviours of people who hold intentions to act in pro-environmental ways.
Shedding light on the situations in which people engage in environmentally significant consumption behaviours can help inform strategies to encourage them to make sustainable choices, for example by highlighting external constraints that get in peoples’ way that need to be addressed for behaviour change to happen, or tailoring interventions to those situations that matter most. Furthermore, as intention-behaviour gaps have been widely documented in consumption behaviours, understanding how situations promote or impede consistency between people’s intentions and actions can help inform strategies to help people follow through.
The project’s main objectives are to provide insights into how situational variables predict 1) environmentally significant behaviours and 2) intention-behaviours gaps within this domain. The project meets these objectives through the in-depth study of a number of environmentally significant consumption behaviours that have been identified in the literature as ‘behavioural hotspots’ including the consumption of meat and single-use plastics. A parallel goal of the MSCA fellowship is to develop the capacity and enhance the future career prospects of the individual researcher. This goal was met through the training, networking and dissemination activities undertaken throughout the project's tenure.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project's work was conducted via 7 work packages (WPs). WP1 & 2 comprised of preparatory work including a literature review and the development and piloting of an event reconstruction instrument to capture the situational drivers of environmentally significant consumption behaviour. WP3 built the Fellow's skills through training and development opportunities. The Fellow undertook training in Multilevel modelling (University of Bristol), Experience Sampling Method (University of Maastricht), Project Management (University College Dublin) and Spatial data analysis in R (UK's Royal Statistical Society). The Fellow was also seconded to the Executive Directorate of the OECD and fed into the organisation's sustainability policies and practices. The secondment resulted in a publication on 'BI Org: Fostering a Behavioural Mindset at the OECD' in the Behavioural Economics Guide 2021 and a how-to guide on "Behavioural Science for Sustainability" with the One Planet Network. In addition, the Fellow collaborated on two research projects using multilevel analysis of day reconstruction data resulting in two publications ‘Daily Emotional Wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic’ published in the British Journal of Health Psychology and ‘Do economic preferences predict pro-environmental behaviour’ published in Ecological Economics. WP4 examined the situational predictors of meat and intention behaviour gaps in meat consumption. It resulted in three separate projects. The first project involved multilevel analyses of the situational predictors of meat consumption in National Nutrition survey datasets from France, Switzerland and the Netherlands. This work is reported in a Geary Institute working paper and is under review at a leading peer-reviewed outlet. In addition, primary quantitative and qualitative data were collected on the situational drivers of intention-behaviour gaps in meat consumption in a longitudinal five-wave study of a large UK sample. This work was supported by a research grant from the Alpro Research Foundation (€29,000) and resulted in two papers in preparation examining 1) the situational cues and psychological situational characteristics that are correlated with people with intentions to reduce their intake of meat desiring, eating and regretting eating meat and 2) the same group's perceptions of those situations via text responses. WP5 involved an event reconstruction study of the individual and situational correlates of single-use coffee cup consumption resulting in a paper in preparation. WP 6 involved the design of situated behavioural interventions and conducting a field trial on meat consumption in the canteens at the OECD's Paris campuses and feeding into a series of trials taking place in coffee shop chains in Gothenburg, Sweden (all trials are currently underway). WP7 was focused on disseminating the project's activities. Highlights include the Fellow contributing to a large Nutri-Web e-symposium on "Changing Behaviour: From Policy to Table", leading a working group on Behavioural Science for Sustainability as part of the UN's programme on Sustainable Lifestyles and Education, moderating a session “Green nudges to increase the circularity of plastics” of the One Planet Network Forum and hosting an international workshop on "Behaviour, Wellbeing and the Environment" (supported by a National University of Ireland grant- €5,000).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This MSCA project pushed the frontiers of research on environmentally significant consumption behaviour in a number of ways. First, it made a series of methodological contributions. The project demonstrates, for the first time, the ability for event reconstruction to produce valuable insights into pro-environmental and environmentally significant consumption behaviours. It also uses this method to examine psychological situational characteristics associated with these behaviours, building on advances in social psychology in taxonimising and measuring situations. Second, the results of the research project also offer valuable insights into the situational drivers of environmentally significant consumption behaviours and intention-behaviour gaps within the same domain. For example, the results of the primary research on meat consumption indicate that people with intentions to reduce their meat intake are more likely to go astray when situations lend themselves to hedonic rather than instrumental type consumption, when their consumption takes place outside of the home, when they are eating with others who are consuming meat and when they are not responsible for their food choice. Other insights are forthcoming from the ongoing primary research projects. Beyond these impacts, the project demonstrates the value of behavioural mapping of environmentally significant consumption behaviours to feed into the design of behavioural interventions and emphasises the importance of situated behavioural interventions to overcome intention-behaviour gaps. Through the Fellow's ongoing work in publishing and disseminating the project's approaches and findings, the project is expected to influence both the academic discourse on, and behavioural public policy strategies aimed at, understanding and encouraging sustainable lifestyle shifts.

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