New psychological research into consumer choice has revealed that carbon labelling is largely ignored and pressure when deciding on purchases leaves many ethical messages discarded by the majority of shoppers.
Research presented to a seminar in Whitehall, London, by Professor Geoffrey Beattie, dean of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester, suggested consumers lie about their shopping attitudes and unconsciously reject carbon labelling.
Beattie told delegates at the Westminster Food and Nutrition Forum that research into explicit and implicit attitudes revealed that, while almost all of the consumers studied in recent research favoured low-carbon products, just 59 per cent had an implicit desire to buy them.
He said: “There is significant evidence that consumers’ actions are divergent from their stated desires. We have also tracked their eyes and found it takes them up to 20 seconds to even see the carbon label. We must deal with the fact that most consumers feel a degree of helplessness with environmental issues and instil a feeling that we are all in it together.”
Stella Nicholas of the National Consumer Federation agreed. She said constraints such as time pressure on decision-making meant confusion over different assurance schemes was exacerbated.
She said: “The various jargon on labels and the direction towards websites causes problems for consumers. Not all of us have time to seek out information on websites and some labelling, such as the traffic light and the daily allowances [information], conflict [with each other].
“There are undoubtedly a number of positives such as country of origin labelling, which allows us to decide where we support, but many of the ethical choices out there are out of reach due to access problems.”
In summing up, Roger Williams MP, chairing the debate, said it had been suggested in the past that consumers knew best and that retailers and policy-makers should follow their lead, but now it was time for the government to at least dictate guidelines over food consumption as the consumer was confused.
But Professor Tim Lang of the Sustainable Development Commission, who had earlier called for the idea of a sustainable diet to be widely acknowledged, told freshinfo: “It is a much more complex issue than just consumer confusion but it is clear that the approach needs to be through a perfect circle of consumer, industry and government. There should be no one leader in the change towards a sustainable diet.
"The retailers constantly assess consumer behaviour but I personally do not want either the government or Tesco dictating what we eat.”
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