Our next Centre for Decision Research seminar is on Teams and in person this week on Wednesday November 5th. All are welcome.
CDR Autumn Seminar
Testing the effects of health-benefit, environmental-benefit and co-benefit priming for promoting sustainable food choice and their psychological mechanisms: A randomized controlled trial combined with eye tracking
Meijun Chen
University of Hong Kong
Wednesday 5th November 2025, 2pm to 3pm (UK time)
University of Leeds, Charles Thackrah (SR G.07),
Also online on Teams (meeting link here)
Abstract
Promoting sustainable diets is consistently documented to be beneficial to health, the environment, and long-term food security. There remains limited understanding of the effects of activating the goal of sustainable diets for achieving co-benefits on sustainable food choice and the potential mechanisms. This study was a pre-registered online randomized controlled trial combined with eye tracking to compare the effects of three priming interventions: health-benefit priming (HP), environment-benefit priming (EP), and combined-benefit priming (CoP), on sustainable food choice. Sustainable food choice was assessed by a simulated online shopping task. Participants’ eye movement data were tracked while they were choosing foods during simulated online shopping. Participants’ executive function (EF), environmental value, health value, and social orientation value were also measured. The results showed a significant difference in sustainable food choices among the four groups, with CoP showing a significant increase compared to the control. The eye-tracking data revealed that the attention to sustainable foods with an eco-friendly logo mediated the association between priming and participants’ sustainable food choices. Furthermore, priming with the co-benefits of sustainable diets can be more effective for participants with greater delay discounting to increase their sustainable food choice. These findings suggest that priming with co-benefits of sustainable diets can be a promising strategy to support more sustainable food choice particularly for consumers with more difficulty delaying their immediate awards.
The speaker
Meijun Chen is a PhD student in the Division of Behavioural Science, School of Public Health, at the University of Hong Kong. She is currently part of a behavioural research team conducting research on sustainable food consumption, eating behaviours, climate change mitigation, and risk communication to support public health. Her research interests focus on promoting healthy and sustainable eating styles, as well as their underlying psychological mechanisms, with a particular focus on interventions targeting automatic decision-making processes to promote behaviour change.