Original title: How consumers process sustainability messages in a randomized two-wave experiment on household food waste reduction in Japan
Researchers gave Japanese consumers messages about food waste framed around taxes, hunger, household costs, or general information. They sorted participants’ written responses into stages describing how people recognize a problem and feel responsible for acting. Tax and hunger messages made more people assign responsibility, while cost messages more often activated a personal sense of duty. But none of the frames changed reported food-saving practices, and the tax frame later lowered motivation.
Imagine a family trying to waste less food while planning meals for the week. A reminder about the grocery bill may make one person feel personally responsible, while a reminder about hunger may make someone else think more about who is affected. But those thoughts do not guarantee that anyone changes what they cook or save. In this paper, the different reminders are the message frames, the family’s thoughts are the responses researchers classified, and the unchanged food-saving habits are the reported practices.
Public campaigns often try to reduce household food waste by changing the way a message is framed. In this experiment, different frames shifted some thoughts about responsibility and personal duty, but not reported food-saving practices—an important gap for people designing campaigns.
The abstract reports self-reported outcomes, not direct measurement of household food waste. It does not establish why the Tax frame lowered motivation; motivational crowding-out is only a possible explanation and was not directly tested. The findings concern Japanese consumers and do not show whether the results apply elsewhere.
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How consumers process sustainability messages in a randomized two-wave experiment on household food waste reduction in Japan — Tomomi Yamane — Discover Sustainability — doi:10.1007/s43621-026-04909-9
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.