Don't Reinvent the Wheel: Adapting an Existing Scale for Meat Rationalization to Understand Motivations for Dairy and Seafood Consumption

摘要: When facing dietary changes such as reducing their meat consumption, consumers often experience ambivalence–a result of simultaneously holding positive and negative views towards meat consumption. This ambivalence can be resolved either by aligning their behavior with their beliefs (rejecting meat) or by aligning their beliefs with their behavior (eg, rationalizing consuming meat). Such rationalizations can be measured using the 16-item 4Ns scale, which quantifies the extent to which individuals endorse meat consumption as Necessary, Normal, Natural, and Nice. Here, we assess whether this scale can be adapted to dairy and seafood, in order to understand how 4N score and consumption are related within these categories. The original 4Ns scale was adjusted to replace “meat” with either “dairy products” or “seafood” and three online studies were conducted: two targeting dairy (N= 175; N= 402), and one targeting seafood (N= 304). The results reveal good internal reliability for both the dairy and seafood versions of the 4Ns scale and showed that within-consumer motivations for consuming dairy/seafood were often akin to those for meat. Similar conditional associations between 4N subscale scores and consumption were observed across all three categories (meat, dairy, seafood), with greater endorsement of the Nice subscale showing the strongest relationship with consumption in all categories. In the case of dairy products, scores on the Nice subscale could accurately categorize consumers as frequent or infrequent users of plant-based dairy alternatives, and endorsement of seafood as Nice was positively associated with greater …