Hi James, neat visualizations, and very validating that you were able to extend our work like this! We worked hard to make our materials legible but you donât really know how well that went until someone actually tries to use them đ So this is great to see.
Yes, a switch away from chicken meat towards beef could be good under some circumstances/âassumptions. But the goal of our experiment was to come up with an effect size large enough to take to Chipotle, and we donât think we found one. My guess is that the interspecies tradeoffs also would not be very persuasive to a fast casual chain relative to beefâs larger climate impact.
Iâm not sure. Sofritas are more or less an analogue to ground beef, but Iâm not sure people make that connection. Our thinking for this experiment was that chicken typically has the fewest analogues widely available, so we should try to focus on that. But I am no longer sure that I have a good sense of how introducing PMAs would impact meat consumption. Yes, we find some evidence that chicknâitas absorbs demand from chicken specifically, but itâs not a slam dunk by any means. Maybe another PMA or two would have larger effects. I doubt it.
I agree that proto-vegetarians might be more actiely exploring alternatives...but how many people are in this category? Iâd venture less than 1% of people are seriously considering it. Probably a much larger category are looking to âcut backâ in some sense, but that might mean many things to them.
I think our experiment has high ecological validity for the thing we are testing, which is the introduction of PMAs to an online, Chipotle-like menu. Thatâs a real environment in which people encounter PMAs, and because itâs online, IMHO it may lack promotion, buzz, etc. Perhaps a more elaborate test of a more fleshed out, multi-component theory would find different effects. On the other hand, our intervention is easily scaled up.
For tests of âhearsay about how X or Y tastes really good, has to be tried etcâ see, Sparkman et al. (2020, e.g. figure 2) and Piester et al. (2020). We review some of those studies here. I think broadly speaking you are talking about norms-based approaches, see here for a general review and here for a review specific to eating meat.
The cleaned data set was very nice to have access to and clearâthe only thing that wasnât clear to me was whether any exclusions were actually applied on the basis of the attention checks, and what the correct answers to the attention question were, but this may be in your documentation already, I just had a fairly quick look and downloaded the csv and got going.
Thanks for the thorough response -
indeed if the goal is about doing something to shift Chipotle/âsimilar chains then the chicken reduction angle is unlikely to be persuasive.
Is there any way of finding out from real data whether people who literally wouldnât go to chipotle started doing so when sofritas became a thing?
Fair enough
Agree with this. I could imagine that over the scale of something like Chipotle, it could be that satisfying the âevery so oftenâ plant-based purchase, as opposed to meat, of reducetarians could be impactful and affect how much meat gets purchased overall, but itâs far from clear and not something weâd be powered to detect with all but the most elaborate experiments, most likely
Thatâs a good point, I actually had not considered people ordering online somehow...to the extent that the study was intending to represent an online experience then yes I consider it more ecologically than I first perceived it to be
Those studies donât really convince me as I donât think itâs possible to actually change what people perceive to be real norms (or basically their schemas of how the world is), or what their friends are saying and getting excited about, or the media is reporting on, which percolates organically and affects ones worldview, with small experimental manipulations, so to this extent I think the sorts of stuff Iâm talking about are very hard experimentally. Even with an online menu I think people still arrive there having already been influenced by all sorts of things, Iâm not referring to explicit advertising that would in the menu or in the store specifically. [edit: but I donât think it is necessary to discuss further]
Hi James, neat visualizations, and very validating that you were able to extend our work like this! We worked hard to make our materials legible but you donât really know how well that went until someone actually tries to use them đ So this is great to see.
Yes, a switch away from chicken meat towards beef could be good under some circumstances/âassumptions. But the goal of our experiment was to come up with an effect size large enough to take to Chipotle, and we donât think we found one. My guess is that the interspecies tradeoffs also would not be very persuasive to a fast casual chain relative to beefâs larger climate impact.
Iâm not sure. Sofritas are more or less an analogue to ground beef, but Iâm not sure people make that connection. Our thinking for this experiment was that chicken typically has the fewest analogues widely available, so we should try to focus on that. But I am no longer sure that I have a good sense of how introducing PMAs would impact meat consumption. Yes, we find some evidence that chicknâitas absorbs demand from chicken specifically, but itâs not a slam dunk by any means. Maybe another PMA or two would have larger effects. I doubt it.
I agree that proto-vegetarians might be more actiely exploring alternatives...but how many people are in this category? Iâd venture less than 1% of people are seriously considering it. Probably a much larger category are looking to âcut backâ in some sense, but that might mean many things to them.
I think our experiment has high ecological validity for the thing we are testing, which is the introduction of PMAs to an online, Chipotle-like menu. Thatâs a real environment in which people encounter PMAs, and because itâs online, IMHO it may lack promotion, buzz, etc. Perhaps a more elaborate test of a more fleshed out, multi-component theory would find different effects. On the other hand, our intervention is easily scaled up.
For tests of âhearsay about how X or Y tastes really good, has to be tried etcâ see, Sparkman et al. (2020, e.g. figure 2) and Piester et al. (2020). We review some of those studies here. I think broadly speaking you are talking about norms-based approaches, see here for a general review and here for a review specific to eating meat.
The cleaned data set was very nice to have access to and clearâthe only thing that wasnât clear to me was whether any exclusions were actually applied on the basis of the attention checks, and what the correct answers to the attention question were, but this may be in your documentation already, I just had a fairly quick look and downloaded the csv and got going.
Thanks for the thorough response -
indeed if the goal is about doing something to shift Chipotle/âsimilar chains then the chicken reduction angle is unlikely to be persuasive.
Is there any way of finding out from real data whether people who literally wouldnât go to chipotle started doing so when sofritas became a thing?
Fair enough
Agree with this. I could imagine that over the scale of something like Chipotle, it could be that satisfying the âevery so oftenâ plant-based purchase, as opposed to meat, of reducetarians could be impactful and affect how much meat gets purchased overall, but itâs far from clear and not something weâd be powered to detect with all but the most elaborate experiments, most likely
Thatâs a good point, I actually had not considered people ordering online somehow...to the extent that the study was intending to represent an online experience then yes I consider it more ecologically than I first perceived it to be
Those studies donât really convince me as I donât think itâs possible to actually change what people perceive to be real norms (or basically their schemas of how the world is), or what their friends are saying and getting excited about, or the media is reporting on, which percolates organically and affects ones worldview, with small experimental manipulations, so to this extent I think the sorts of stuff Iâm talking about are very hard experimentally. Even with an online menu I think people still arrive there having already been influenced by all sorts of things, Iâm not referring to explicit advertising that would in the menu or in the store specifically. [edit: but I donât think it is necessary to discuss further]