Daily reminders about the animal-welfare, environmental and health consequences of meat and their main and moderated effects on meat consumption

The paper, in plain language

A cheap intervention, tested honestly

Text-message nudges are the kind of intervention policymakers love: cheap, scalable, unobtrusive. With Ida Strande Ottersen and Nora Benningstad, I tested whether daily reminders about why meat is problematic — for animals, for the climate, for health — would reduce what people actually ate day by day over a week.

The result nobody advertises

Consumption did not fall; it increased significantly over the intervention week, and none of the three message types worked. The single moderated effect points at emotion rather than information: on days with animal-welfare reminders, participants prone to disgust ate less red meat — consistent with our dissociation research, where disgust and empathy, not facts, carry the effects. This summary rests on the paper's published abstract, which carries the study's full conclusions.

Why it matters

Null results rarely get published, which is exactly how fields end up recommending interventions that don't work. This one says plainly: text-based appeals may have limited effects on meat consumption, and information alone is a weak lever. The finding that emotional susceptibility moderated the one effect that existed connects to the rest of my food-psychology strand — from cuteness to dissociation, it is affect that moves the meal.