“Unattractive = Natural”: How Explicit and Implicit Beliefs Jointly Affect Consumer Purchase of Unattractive Produce

The disposal of safe and edible yet aesthetically unattractive produce results in massive food waste, prompting an increase in research exploring factors that can facilitate acceptance of unattractive produce. Among the various factors, consumers’ “unattractive = natural” belief is receiving especially more attention. We propose that two types of “unattractive = natural” beliefs—implicit and explicit ones—jointly affect consumer choice. Precisely, consumers with incongruent (vs. congruent) implicit and explicit “unattractive = natural” beliefs exhibit a greater preference for unattractive produce. We further uncover that the incongruence between implicit and explicit beliefs engenders elaborative thinking, which corrects for the consumer bias against unattractive produce. Two studies, using different methods to measure implicit beliefs (i.e., the Implicit Association Test and word embeddings method) and consumer purchase (i.e., real choice and scale measure), provide convergent evidence for the proposed effects. This research contributes to the literature on consumer attitudes toward unattractive produce and implicit/explicit beliefs, and it provides important managerial insights regarding food waste.

安全可食用但外观欠佳的农产品遭到丢弃，会造成大规模食物浪费，这推动相关研究不断增加，旨在探索能够提升消费者对外观欠佳农产品接受度的影响因素。在各类影响因素中，消费者所持有的「外观欠佳=天然」观念受到了格外多的关注。本研究提出，两类「外观欠佳=天然」的观念——内隐观念与外显观念——会共同影响消费者的选择。具体而言，内隐与外显「外观欠佳=天然」观念不一致（相较于一致）的消费者，对外观欠佳农产品的偏好程度更高。本研究进一步揭示，内隐与外显观念之间的不一致会引发精细化思考，从而纠正消费者对外观欠佳农产品的偏见。两项研究分别采用不同方法测量内隐观念（即内隐联想测验（Implicit Association Test）与词嵌入方法）以及消费者购买行为（即真实选择与量表测量），为所提出的效应提供了聚合性实证证据。本研究丰富了消费者对外观欠佳农产品的态度以及内隐/外显观念相关的文献，并为食物浪费领域提供了重要的管理启示。