Scientists at Durham University in the U.K. have come up with a way to shame people out of eating meat: warning labels on meat products that state consuming them will harm the planet.

According to the manuscript, putting warning labels on meat products does modify behaviors and, it turns out that warning people about meat consumption effects to curb climate change had an impact greater than health-related warnings on cigarette packages. In the U.K., the warnings are very explicit, but apparently don’t change behavior that much making overall warning label effectiveness negligible.

Contrary to our predictions, we did not find evidence that the health warning labels were any more effective at lowering hypothetical meat meal selection when compared to the climate and pandemic warning labels. Climate warning labels were however the most supported by our participants when considering whether any of these warning labels should be enacted as policies. As can be seen in Online Supplementary Materials in our Pilot Study we found that participants considered the impact of meat consumption on climate change as most consequential when compared to the impact on human health and future risk of pandemics. Furthermore, environmental concerns, but not health and pandemic concerns, predicted the proportion of meat meals selected in our experimental task. The higher public support for the climate warning labels may stem from these considerations. This would be consistent with prior work on public support for various obesity policies, which also correlates with people’s prior beliefs about the causes of obesity (e.g., Beeken & Wardle, 2013). Notably, climate warning labels were also rated as most credible in our study, along with health warning labels. The introduction of climate pictorial warning labels may therefore be both effective and most acceptable to the public.

The scientists seemingly sought to promote using emotion-based warning labels with graphic pictures or graphics. In essence, since people couldn’t be persuaded, then fear would be utilized to achieve the desired outcome.

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