Research has recently started investigating possible methods to encourage consumers to reduce meat consumption. However, few studies examine highly scalable messaging techniques, whether they have long-term effects, and how to best craft such appeals. This includes whether it is more effective to use “reduce” appeals to eat less meat or “eliminate” appeals to categorically stop eating meat. We examine these questions in the context of a recently proposed social psychological technique to curb meat consumption: conveying dynamic norm information that more and more people are starting to curb their meat consumption. In a multi-wave longitudinal survey experiment, we contrast the effectiveness of reduce and eliminate appeals in a scalable medium: an op-ed. We find that the reduce appeal effectively reduced meat consumption in dietary reports five months out from reading the op-ed compared to a control, while the eliminate appeal did not. Further, a second longitudinal experiment assesses the heterogeneity of this effect among a national sample, and finds that these effects exist specifically among populations that are younger, more liberal, more educated, and less wealthy.

最近的研究已经开始研究鼓励消费者减少肉类消费的可能方法。但是，很少有研究检查高度可扩展的消息传递技术，它们是否具有长期影响以及如何最好地发挥这种吸引力。这包括使用“减少”呼吁少吃肉还是“消除”呼吁绝对停止吃肉更有效。我们在最近提出的抑制肉类消费的社会心理技术的背景下研究了这些问题：传达动态的规范信息，表明越来越多的人开始抑制肉类消费。在多波纵向调查实验中，我们对比了在可扩展媒体（op-ed）中减少和消除吸引力的有效性。我们发现，与对照组相比，减少吸引力可以有效减少饮食报告中的肉类消耗量（与阅读前五个月相比），而消除吸引力却没有。此外，第二个纵向实验评估了这种影响在全国样本中的异质性，并发现这些影响特别存在于年轻，更自由，受教育程度更高和财富较少的人群中。