What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

We love the variety of food available worldwide, despite inflated and rising prices. We get to enjoy meats our grandparents couldn’t. On the opposite hand, having diverse food choices contributes to enormous carbon emissions and clashes with sustainable climate goals. Hence, why shifting to eco-friendly diets matters.

Changing diets isn’t easy. Instead of strict rules or higher prices, researchers use subtle nudges to gently guide us toward better choices without being overbearing or controlling. However, using these nudges on a wide scale is tough. Sometimes, it raises concerns about whether people are aware they’re being “nudged” to change. Especially with personal choices like diets, some argue it’s not right to push people on what to eat.

The Green Nudge:

To address these challenges, a novel approach in behavioural science, known as “nudge+”, can empower individuals to reflect on their choices and encourage meaningful shifts towards more environmentally friendly behaviours. A nudge+ is a combination of a nudge with an encouragement to think. This modification to the nudge allows people to reflect on their choices and decide whether they want to follow a certain nudge or not.

Designed in this way, a nudge+ makes behaviour change more legitimate, ethical and effective. In a recent publication in “Nature Sustainability”, the authors experimented with 3,074 UK participants to validate their proposition that human agency enhances the effectiveness of behaviour change tools.

Four nudge+ interventions were used: Two combined “the green default” or “carbon-labelled” nudge with transparent information disclosure. The other two nudges partially integrated the „think“ aspect with the green default; allowing pledges before or after defaulting to the green menu. The nudge+ primarily prompted a pledge without deep menu deliberation. Once committed to eco-friendly eating, it automatically directed individuals to the green menu, simplifying their intention execution.

The result: All interventions effectively increased intentions to choose sustainable foods. Notably, the most effective results were achieved by promoting reflection on dietary preferences before guiding individuals towards greener diet choices. The addition of a pledge before implementing the default nudge, as seen in the nudge+ approach, led to a 40% reduction in emissions resulting from intended meal selections.

What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

Reducing our collective consumption of animal products is an important shift to help mitigate the climate crisis. Despite this, meals containing meat are often presented as the default, rather than more environmentally sustainable vegetarian or vegan options. This is a particularly critical issue in the US, where per capita meat consumption is among the highest in the world.

The Green Nudge:

What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

A key aspect of sustainable diets is to prevent overconsumption of unhealthy foods, which often carry a large environmental footprint. In this way, healthy and sustainable food choices can go hand-in-hand. 

However, food choices are difficult to change, because they often do not rely upon conscious reflection. Also, a large majority of food decisions are made in “busy” environments, such as (online) supermarkets, with multiple competing influences on food choice. Indeed, unhealthy food choices can be due to the lack of a clear and simple behavioural “trigger” for making responsible decisions at the right moment.

The Green Nudge:

A new type of digital nudge, called “just-in-time” (JIT) nudges, can positively influence product choice, such as when a person adds an unhealthy product to their virtual shopping cart. 

The Tilburg University researchers partnered up with industry mobile developer Nakko to carry out a large field experiment with more than 20,000 participants. The study tested the ability of digital JIT nudges to increase healthy food purchases using a mobile self-scanning app. With the app, people could self-scan product barcodes from supermarket shelves, which added them to a virtual cart for easier checkout. 

Participants in the study were divided into four groups. In the first group, when the app scanned an unhealthy product, it displayed a pop-up with a suggestion for a healthier alternative to choose. In the second and third groups of participants, the pop-up suggestion was accompanied by either text-based health information (e.g., “This alternative contains less sugar”) or image-based health information (a healthy heart logo). The fourth group – the control group – received no suggestions for alternative products.

The result: a higher percentage of nudged healthier products were chosen in the suggestion-only condition (38%) than in the control condition (30%), whereas the addition of text- or image-based health information did not boost effects. 

Are you aware of any other nudges that promote healthier food choices? Feel free to comment or get in touch: hello@green-nudges.com

What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

Lebanon faces significant challenges in managing plastic waste due to a high rate of plastic consumption and inadequate waste management infrastructure. Around 11% to 13% of the Municipal Solid Waste generated in Lebanon consists of plastics. Although some of it is recycled, most is either landfilled or openly dumped and incinerated. 

Despite the harmful effects of plastic on the environment, most restaurants continue to provide plastic cutlery with their delivery orders by default, even when customers may not necessarily need or want it. Concurrently, customers do not usually care to ask for the exclusion of cutlery. As such, unutilised plastic cutlery is discarded, resulting in unnecessary (yet avoidable) environmental costs. 

There are several biases and bottlenecks that prevent customers from opting-out of receiving plastic cutlery, even when they do not need it. Most customers are susceptible to the status-quo bias (the tendency to stick with the current state of affairs, i.e., the default inclusion of plastic cutlery), or social norms bias (the tendency to follow what others are doing), or to cognitive overload (although they care about the environment, it may not occur to them to request the exclusion of cutlery from their meals because they are focused on other tasks).

The Green Nudge:

What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

Liseberg, Sweden’s largest amusement park, aims to become a global leader in sustainable park operations by 2025. A key milestone in this endeavour is minimising the climate impact of food and beverage sales.

The Swedisch Behaviour Lab (Beteendelabbet) was hired to examine and investigate how nudging and behavioural design could be used to increase the sale of vegetarian food at one of the park’s restaurants called Café Taube. 

The Behavior Lab discovered three key insights by analysing and exploring the decision-making environment of customers, as well as conducting interviews and observing customer behaviour:

1. The menu placed outside the restaurant only displayed meat and fish dishes 
2. Numerous customers experienced “decision stress” and tended to select dishes prominently displayed at the beginning of the menu
3. The vegetarian options were depicted as less appealing, being positioned as a mere alternative to meat rather than showcasing their own enticing qualities as delicious dishes

Based on these behavioural insights, The Behavioral Lab developed designs and methods to make it easier and more attractive to choose the vegetarian option.

The Green Nudge:

What unsustainable behavior needs to change:

The global food system contributes significantly to CO2 emissions, and the negative impact is particularly high for meat and dairy products. Recent research indicates that food emissions alone could prevent global temperatures from staying within the safe range of the Paris Agreement’s target of limiting temperature rise to below 2°C. Therefore, there is an urgent need to make widespread changes in our collective diets by eating more plant-based foods (that are resource-efficient) and fewer animal-based products. 

Achieving the goal of eating a more sustainable diet can be challenging, especially in indulgent surroundings. Restaurants, in particular, can have a strong influence on our culinary choices, since they rely heavily on our senses of taste and smell.

The Green Nudge:

Dr. Sophie Attwood explores the use of overlooked sensory primes like sound to promote sustainable eating in restaurants, cafes or canteens. 

Images and indulgent descriptions are common ways to prime food choices, motivating diners to select more plant-rich meals. However, sensory primes targeting sight, smell, and sound can also nudge people towards lower-emitting foods. While taste and touch are important factors post-choice, the aforementioned can play a significant role pre-choice. 

Let’s explore sound.

Our ears have a powerful influence on our perception of food, but are often overlooked. Congruence plays a role here, with sounds that match taste expectations (i.e. a rustle of a crisp packet, crunchy white noise with fresh crudité) shown to enhance eating experiences.

Calming music and natural sounds, such as waves and bird songs, have been linked to a higher preference for plant-based foods, including fruits and vegetables. The soothing effect of music may help us avoid cognitive fatigue and encourage more thoughtful, value-driven decisions.

By introducing relaxing soundscapes in restaurants, cafes and canteens, we can hypothesise that more sustainable plant-rich food choices will follow. Implementing different soundscapes in food service and retail settings is a cheap, easy, and unobtrusive intervention that could encourage a shift from animal-based to plant-based options. Experimentation with various soundscapes could help determine which is the most effective in promoting sustainable food choices.

Are you aware of any other Green Nudges that use our senses? Feel free to get in touch: hello@green-nudges.com