From social interactions to private environmental behaviours: The case of consumer food waste

TL;DR

This paper develops an agent-based model to understand how social interactions influence private food waste behaviors, highlighting the roles of social mixing, openness, and committed groups in promoting low-waste practices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model incorporating cognitive dissonance and heterogeneity in opinions and behaviors, calibrated with Italian household data.

Findings

Limited social mixing can trigger behavior change.

Openness of mind is crucial for wasteful individuals to change.

A small committed group can influence larger populations.

Abstract

Consumer food waste, like many environmental behaviours, takes place in private, and is not directly subject to social monitoring. Nevertheless, social interactions can affect private opinions and behaviours. This paper builds an agent-based model of interactions between consumers heterogeneous in their sociability, initial opinions and behaviours related to food waste and willingness to consider different opinions, in order to assess how social interactions can affect private behaviours. Compared to existing models of opinion dynamics, we innovate by including a range of ``cognitive dissonance'' between stated opinions and actual behaviours that consumers are willing to accept before changing one of the two. We calibrate the model using questionnaire data on household food waste in Italy. We find that a limited degree of mixing between different socio-demographic groups, namely adult and young consumers, is enough to trigger change, but a certain openness of mind is required from more wasteful individuals. Equally, a small group of environmentally committed consumers can attract a sizeable share of the population towards low-waste behaviours if they show a certain variability of opinions and are willing to compromise with individuals in their close neighbourhood in terms of opinions. These findings can help design effective interventions to promote pro-environmental behaviours, taking advantage of the beneficial network effects while anticipating negative externalities.