Improving carbon footprint estimates of food items with a simple seeding procedure

Abstract

Laypeople's estimates of carbon footprints have repeatedly shown to be deficient, which may hinder targeted behavior change to reduce CO 2 emissions. In an online study (N = 127), a vast underestimation of carbon footprints for 60 food items was observed in an on average highly educated convenience sample, confirming a lack of carbon footprints knowledge. Then, target carbon footprint values for a small subset of 15 "seeding" items were provided, which led to a large improvement in a second estimate for both the seeding as well as the remaining transfer items. A lens model analysis showed that participants adjusted the weighting of several predictors in the correct direction due to this simple intervention. It is argued that although almost 30 years old, "seeding the knowledge base" has probably been neglected as an effective low-cost intervention for improving quantitative knowledge of the public. This is especially important concerning societal problems that rely on adequate numerical knowledge for behavior regulation.

A simple intervention can improve estimates of sugar content.

“…This latter finding indicates that seeding changed the representation of the domain more broadly, as we found a transfer of knowledge gained via seed items to new items. Our study thus supports the conceptual distinction between the two aspects of knowledge (Brown & Siegler, 1993) and extends prior findings on effects of seeding on quantitative estimates (e.g., Bröder et al, 2023; Groß et al, in press; Wohldmann, 2015) to the novel domain of sugar content. The visualization of the seed facts did not lead to further improvement; learning the correct values was sufficient to improve knowledge.…”

“…The typical finding is that postseeding estimates are more accurate than the preseeding estimates for both seeded and unseeded items. Such seeding effects have been documented for various real-world domains, for example, country populations (Brown & Siegler, 1993; Groß et al, in press; LaVoie et al, 2002), city-to-city distances (e.g., Brown & Siegler, 2001), latitudes and longitudes (Friedman & Brown, 2000), prices of products (Lawson & Bhagat, 2002), food calories (Wohldmann, 2015), and the carbon footprint associated with the production of food (Bröder et al, 2023).…”

Preschoolers’ use of cue validities as weights in decision-making: Certainty does not substantially change the world

“…However, when evaluating the different locations, the father's advice outweighs the grandmother's advice. In this way, considering cue validities enhances judgment and decision-making (Bröder et al, 2023;Glöckner and Betsch, 2008). The consideration of weights has been proposed to be a 'law' of choice behavior (Bhatia et al, 2021)-at least among adults.…”