Experimental Design Details
We use two treatments and a control, to assess if the consumption of meat in the lab influences attitudes, knowledge and willingness to pay for information (WTP) about meat. Subjects are randomly assigned to the two treatments T-Past and T-Future and to the baseline treatment T-Control. Subjects in T-Past are served meat before their WTP, attitudes and knowledge are elicited. Subjects in T-Future anticipate that they will be served meat after their WTP, attitudes and knowledge are elicited. Subjects in T-Control only differ in that they are not served any meat before or after their WTP, attitudes and knowledge are elicited.
Consuming meat may create cognitive dissonance when confronted with its consequences for animal welfare, the environment, and own health. Based on the literature on motivated beliefs (Bénabou and Tirole, 2016) and information avoidance (Golman et al., 2017), we conjecture that eating meat fosters the tendency to avoid and disregard information concerning meat, in particular concerning the negative consequences of meat consumption. Hestermann et al. (2020) formally develop this argument and our hypotheses
follow more or less directly from their model. [see Meat_Hypotheses_and_AnalysisPlan.pdf]