Carbon Labels on Restaurant Menus: Evidence for Ecologically Responsible Dining, Social Pressure, and Rebound

The present experiment examines the effect of carbon labels on dish choices and their corresponding greenhouse gas emissions in restaurants. Moreover, it was determined how the Theory of Planned Behavior’s concepts of attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control relate to dish choices in the presence versus absence of carbon labels. By applying the experimental conditions within participants, we investigated further how dish choice behavior modulates after removing carbon labels from menus. The online participants ( N = 254) chose one dish each from eight hypothetical menus that either did or did not include numeric traffic-light carbon labels. As expected, carbon labels reduced the proportion of high-emission dish choices and the mean greenhouse gas emission per chosen dish. However, this effect is mainly attributed to an increase in high-emission dish choices after removing the carbon labels, thus indicating a rebound effect. Attitude and perceived behavioral control contributed to the explanation of dish choices following carbon labels, whereas subjective norm did not, indicating that the correlation of perceived social pressure with dining intention overlaps with the effect of carbon labels. We discuss that the usefulness of carbon labels on restaurant menus is rather limited.