ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Nutr.
Sec. Nutrition and Sustainable Diets
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnut.2025.1653935
Affective and reflective attitudes towards vegetarian food consumption: The effect of goal priming
Provisionally accepted
- University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany
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Objectives: The study's primary goal was to investigate the effect of goal priming on implicit and explicit attitudes towards vegetarian food consumption and food choice behavior within the context of dual-process models that describe sustainable behavior. Methods: A total of 128 participants were randomly assigned to either a goal priming intervention group or a control group. After reading a short priming text, all participants completed an explicit rating task, an Implicit Association Test (IAT), and a simulated online supermarket task to assess actual food-related choices. Results: Participants in the intervention group exhibited significantly more positive implicit attitudes towards vegetarian food compared to those in the control group. Explicit attitudes towards vegetarian food were also significantly more positive in the intervention group, although to a smaller extent. No significant group differences were found in explicit attitudes towards meat-based nutrition or in food choice behavior. However, mediation analysis revealed a significant indirect effect of goal priming on behavior via implicit attitudes. Exploratory analyses showed consistent gender differences across all outcome variables, which attenuated the priming effects when included as a covariate. Conclusion: Although the intervention did not result in direct behavioral change, the findings support the potential of goal priming to influence automatic affective and reflective processes that may precede the development of sustainable behavior.
Keywords: goal priming, implicit attitudes, explicit attitudes, Vegetarian nutrition, sustainable behavior, Dual-process models, Evaluative Readiness
Received: 25 Jun 2025; Accepted: 20 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Daiss and Jansen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Fabian Daiss, fabian.daiss@ur.de
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