Hope is never wasted: Hope as a tool to reduce food waste

Abstract

Food waste has become a global challenge leading to major negative impacts on economies, the environment, and societies. Even though food waste occurs across the whole food supply chain, most food is wasted at the household level, making it a particularly potent point to reduce food waste. Prior research has designed various interventions to address food waste issues. One of the most commonly used tools are messages, but they have typically focused on cognitive and negative emotional aspects of consumption. Hence, less is known about the impact of positive emotions on reducing food waste. This relative lack of research on positive emotions in the food waste context is surprising because positive emotions have been shown to have a profound influence on guiding behavior and creating mental and physical resources for humans. In this regard, hope plays a prominent role by helping people to focus on future goals and creating pathways to achieve them. Focusing on the positive emotion of hope, this thesis aims to design and investigate the effect of different types of messages in eliciting hope and consequently can increase positive attitudes towards reducing food waste, increase intention to reduce food waste, and encourage behavior change at household level (this thesis has used a behavioral measure in paper one as a proxy for assessing participants’ behavior to reduce food waste, which will be called behavior hereafter). This thesis comprises three experimental papers which are interrelated. The connection between them relies on the dimensions of hope theory, in which hope is defined as a derived sense of agency and pathway (Snyder & Lopez, 2002) related to self and others (Bernardo, 2010). Taken together, the papers show that 1) hope is a powerful causal mechanism to in the quest to reduce food waste, 2) that hope can be elicited by a variety of different appeals (e.g., gain/loss messages, religious/non-religious appeals, difficult/easy tasks), 3) hope impacts different important precursors to attitudes towards reducing food waste, intention to reduce food waste and behavior change. The first paper focuses on pathways thinking and matches gain (vs. loss) messages with how (vs. why) messages. The results show that hope elicited by a gain (vs. loss) message mediates the relationship between messages and intentions and behavior, and hope becomes more effective when how (vs. why) messages are evaluated. Paper one contributes to hope theory by showing that the type of information plays a prominent role in increasing intention to reduce food waste. Specifically, hopeful individuals who try to attain their goals may not have enough information. Hence, providing them with a ‘how’ message showing them the ways to reduce food waste, consumers can create their own pathways to attaining their goals, and consequently will have higher intention. The second paper focuses on agency thinking and investigates the impact of messages designed based on internal and external loci of hope. Paper two uses religious (vs. non-religious) and communal (vs. agentic) appeals and shows that religious appeals lead to lower intention to reduce food waste compared to non-religious appeals. Hence, this research found that to increase the behavioral intention, non-religious appeals should be paired with communal (vs. agentic) appeals. The results also support a finding that hope is the underlying mechanism. This paper contributes to hope theory by showing that, after comparing messages consistent with internal (i.e., self) and external (i.e., others and God) loci of hope, only a message about receiving support from the community leads to hope. Extending the previous papers, paper three focuses on pathways thinking again, but by designing messages with different levels of task difficulty. This paper investigates the conditions under which difficult (vs. easy) tasks can increase positive attitudes towards reducing food waste. The results show only that when people have high (vs. low) level of achievement motivation and when they evaluate communal (vs. agentic) appeals, difficult (vs. easy) tasks lead to a more positive attitude towards reducing food waste. The results also support the mediating role of hope. This paper contributes to hope theory by highlighting that the difficulty of tasks designed to reduce food waste plays an important role in increasing hope. Specifically, difficult tasks which may be more effective at reducing food waste (vs. easy tasks that may be less effective) lead to higher levels of hope and consequently a more positive attitude towards reducing food waste when people are high in achievement motivation and receive support from community. The three papers together also contribute to the food waste context by showing that the positive emotion of hope, and positive framing, can increase positive attitudes towards reducing food waste, increase intention to reduce food waste, and encourage behavior change. Further, this thesis designs different types of messages which can reduce food waste effectively at the household level. This equips practitioners, social marketers and organizations fighting against food waste with knowledge of the most effective ways to encourage households to change their food waste behavior.