| Popis: |
When attempting to lose weight or adopt a more sustainable diet, most people struggle considerably to permanently change their eating behaviour. To develop novel interventions needed to help participants achieve their goals, it is first necessary to understand what motivates individual consumption. In the present study, we assessed individual consumption motivation in 70 participants for 16 diverse food groups across 5 time points over a two-week period. Participants were recruited to take part in an online survey. Across time points, participants rated the 16 food groups 5 times, first, on 2 dependent variables (consumption frequency and portion size), and second, on 6 potential motives that could predict consumption (enjoyment of taste, fillingness, healthiness, automaticity, emotional satisfaction, and self-identity). The two dependent variables were later combined by calculating their product to create a single dependent variable for consumption. Of interest was firstly to assess whether implicit learning effects emerged, specifically an increase in correlation strength between dependent variable and predictors from timepoint 1 to timepoint 5. Second, using G-Theory and intraclass correlations, we assessed the stability of each individual’s consumption motives over time. We also established the motives that best explained each individual’s consumption and how much variance they explained. Lastly, we assessed how much insight individuals have into their consumption motives. We found significant implicit learning effects in the association of consumption with healthiness, self-identity and filligness. Across the five time points, participants consumption motives remained remarkably stable. We observed large individual differences in motivation for consumption across participants. Finally, participants exhibited little awareness of their consumption motives as captured by their implicit motivation judgments. To our knowledge this is the first study to establish the stability of situated consumption motivation over time. Our results furthermore provide possible starting points for novel interventions, empathising the importance of individualised instead of ‘one size fits all’ approaches. |
