Motivated reasoning in sustainable consumption: A partisan environmental framing experiment

This project studies whether politically congruent environmental framing can shift a sustainable consumption choice: the willingness to try foods made with edible insects, which provide protein with a much smaller environmental footprint than conventional livestock. I will field two online studies with adults in the United States recruited through Prolific. A short survey (N = 900) will measure baseline willingness to try insect-based foods under a neutral safety-only message. A larger survey experiment (N = 2 700) will then compare three messages: a neutral environmental frame, a Democratic-leaning frame emphasizing climate change, and a Republican-leaning frame emphasizing stewardship of land and preserving resources for future generations. The main outcome is a binary willingness-to-try measure, complemented by a binding lottery choice and a simple willingness-to-pay elicitation. The study is designed to provide causal evidence on whether political identity moderates behavioral responses to environmental information in a concrete consumption context.