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Barriers to sustainable consumption attenuated by foreign language use

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Abstract

The adoption of certain innovative products, such as recycled water, artificial meat and insect-based food, could help promote sustainability. However, the disgust these products elicit acts as a barrier to their consumption. Here, we show that describing such products in a foreign language attenuates the disgust these products trigger and heightens their intended as well as actual consumption.

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Fig. 1: Language influences willingness to consume.
Fig. 2: Language influences willingness to consume through feelings of disgust.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Puntoni, J. Levav and L. Burnett for valuable comments on preliminary versions of this manuscript and J. Bekkers and J. Klesse for assisting with data collection. Financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (VENI grant 451-15-023 awarded to A.K.) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Janet Geipel

  2. Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Constantinos Hadjichristidis

  3. Centre for Decision Research, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Constantinos Hadjichristidis

  4. Department of Marketing Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

    Anne-Kathrin Klesse

Authors
  1. Janet Geipel
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  2. Constantinos Hadjichristidis
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  3. Anne-Kathrin Klesse
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Contributions

J.G. and C.H. developed the study concept. All authors contributed to the study design. J.G. performed testing and data collection for Experiments 1–3 and A.K. coordinated data collection for Experiment 4. J.G. performed the data analysis and interpretation under the supervision of C.H. and A.K.; J.G. and C.H. drafted the manuscript, and A.K. provided critical revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Janet Geipel.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Results, Supplementary Figs. 1,2 and Supplementary Tables 1–9.

Supplementary Data Sets

Data related to Experiments 1–4.

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Geipel, J., Hadjichristidis, C. & Klesse, AK. Barriers to sustainable consumption attenuated by foreign language use. Nat Sustain 1, 31–33 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-017-0005-9

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