Research on the Influence of"Good Looking Means High Quality"Judgment Bias on Suboptimal Food Waste:Psychological Mechanism and Coping Strategies
Currently,global food security is facing serious challeng-es,and the issue of food waste cannot be underestimated.Among them,the waste problem caused by food appearance defects is be-coming increasingly serious.These edible foods with appearance defects are called subprime foods.The waste of subprime foods stems from consumers'aesthetic preferences,and the existing aca-demic research mainly focuses on consumers'perceptual barriers to subprime foods and intervention measures to promote the purchase of subprime foods.However,previous studies have rarely explored in depth the deep psychological mechanisms and implicit cognitive biases that lead consumers to avoid subprime foods,which greatly limits the effectiveness of their intervention measures.Therefore,based on the Lay Theory,this study finds that consumers have an implicit belief that"beautiful appearance equals high quality,"and proposes to strengthen consumers'perception of the naturalness of subprime foods by"cool anthropomorphic images",thereby en-hancing consumers'willingness to purchase,and verifies the mod-erating role of consumers'autonomy level.This study conducted a total of four experiments,switching vari-ous stimuli,scenarios,and measurement methods to enhance the validity and robustness of the research.Experiment 1 first explored consumers'views on issues such as product pricing,advantages and disadvantages,purchase intention,and waste of subprime foods through a pre-survey,and verified that consumers have an implicit belief of"beautiful appearance equals high quality"in food selec-tion through a comparison of two groups of prototype foods and subprime foods(H1).Experiment 2 verified through a laboratory experiment simulating real shopping situations that under the com-parison with prototype foods,the cool anthropomorphic promotion method can positively promote consumers'willingness to purchase and recommend subprime foods(H2).Experiment 3 aimed to ver-ify the mediating effect of naturalness perception(H3),which was tested through direct measurement of mediating variables(Experi-ment 3A)and moderation of mediation(Experiment 3B),excluding alternative explanatory mechanisms such as taste evaluation,health evaluation,demographic characteristics,consumer emotions,and consumer involvement.Experiment 4 was set in a food market research scenario,verifying that consumers'autonomy level mod-erates the effect of cool anthropomorphism on the willingness to purchase subprime foods(H4).The results found that(1)consumers have a common belief of"beautiful appearance equals high quality"in food selection,believing that subprime foods have lower taste and health attributes;(2)cool anthropomorphism positively affects consumers'willingness to purchase subprime foods;(3)the per-ception of naturalness of subprime foods plays a mediating role in the positive effect of cool anthropomorphism on consumers'will-ingness to purchase subprime foods;(4)autonomy level moderates the effect of cool anthropomorphism on the willingness to purchase subprime foods.This study has good theoretical value and practical significance.On the theoretical level,first,this study clarifies the impact path of consumers'"aesthetic bias"on the perception barriers of subprime foods,finds that the belief of"beautiful appearance equals high quality"negatively affects consumers'preferences for subprime foods mainly through food taste and health attributes,providing insights for proposing how to intervene in subprime waste in retail scenarios.Second,this study innovatively applies cool anthropo-morphic measures in the field of food decision-making to address food waste issues,promoting cross-domain integration and devel-opment of anthropomorphic methods,social marketing,and food waste.Third,this study clarifies the relationship between subprime foods and consumers'perception of naturalness.Fourth,this study incorporates the level of autonomy into the context of cool anthro-pomorphism promotion,providing a new perspective on the appli-cation boundaries of this study's effects.On the practical level,reducing food waste is an important issue for promoting global sustainable development,but traditional interven-tion tools are ineffective.The cool anthropomorphic image proposed in this study echoes the spirit of the central government's"Food Conservation Action Plan",providing an effective and low-cost pol-icy plan for the government to promote social food sustainability.At the same time,the cool anthropomorphic design of subprime foods can also provide enterprises with low-cost but efficient management tools to help solve the problem of sluggish sales of subprime foods and promote retail companies'sales of subprime foods.Specifical-ly,subprime foods are most common in small and medium-sized farms,and the low-cost and easy-to-implement characteristics of cool anthropomorphism can effectively solve their sales difficulties.By giving subprime foods a stronger sense of naturalness through cool anthropomorphic design and combining them with the non-in-dustrialized characteristics of small and medium-sized farmers,it forms an effective product selling point to promote the sales of a large number of subprime foods.
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