How do we convince people to eat less meat? Put vegetarian options higher up on the menu for a start, a new study suggests.
The research, published in Sustainable Tourism, showed that simply redesigning the layout of a hotel menu was more effective in turning people on to plant-based meals, compared to text methods that tried to directly persuade people to switch meat dishes for plant-focused fare.
The researchers on the new paper visited two local hotels, where they supplied staff with specially-designed menus for their guests. These menus tested two established psychological approaches designed to ‘nudge’ people towards one choice or another.
One set of menus used what are known as ‘cognitive nudges’ to influence people’s choices, by featuring a message telling guests that 85% of hotel patrons choose to eat vegetarian, and then asked ‘Will you be eating vegetarian today?’ This relied on what’s known as the ‘bandwagon effect’, which is the idea that people will generally feel pressured into joining the majority.
The second set of menus used ‘behavioral nudges’, a more subtle approach which involved the visual redesign of the menu. In this case each menu was split between vegan/vegetarian dishes, and meat dishes—and then one menu strategically listed all the vegetarian/vegan options first, while the other listed the meat-based dishes first. The idea here was to prime each set of meal options in people’s minds to see if that made them more likely to select one over the other.
Alongside the cognitive and behavioral test menus, the hotels also added their default regular menu into the mix as a control. The study included 647 participants overall, who didn’t know they were part of the research, to ensure their responses would be genuine.
What this social experiment revealed was that while meat remained the dominant choice across all menu groups, the share of people who chose vegetarian dishes shifted notably upwards in some scenarios.
Firstly, the hotel guests were clearly influenced by the cognitive approach, which seemed to work in convincing them to go veggie. At one of the hotels, for example, 22% of participants chose the vegetarian meal when they received a menu with the cognitive messaging telling them how many of their peers had chosen vegetarian, compared to just 13% who chose it off the regular default menu where no intervention was used. This suggests that information does encourage greener choices.
But maybe surprisingly, out of all the menus it was the behavioral interventions that did the real heavy-lifting.
The researchers found that hotel guests were more likely to opt for vegetarian dishes when they received menus that listed plant-based meals first. At one of the hotels, the number of people choosing vegetarian meals leapt up from just 2 out of 44, to 14 out of 42. The behavioural effect was so powerful that the researchers calculated the guests had a 654% higher odds of ordering a vegetarian dish than those who received the cognitive intervention.
“Cognitive approaches, like giving people facts about sustainability, assume that if people know better, they’ll do better,” says Sofie Voss, an assistant researcher atthe University of Surrey, and the study’s lead author. “But the reality is, even when we want to make sustainable choices, we often default to what’s easy or familiar”—like choosing what’s most obvious on a menu.
Interestingly, even under the meat-first behavioral scenario, the percentage of people who chose vegetarian options was still higher than the percentage who selected vegetarian dishes under the default menu scenario. The researchers pondered this unusual result and think it occurred because the hotels’ default menus were arranged such that each meat option such as a ‘House burger’ was accompanied by a ‘Vegan option’ listed below it in less visible text. Unintentionally, this sent the message that meat is the default.
In comparison, even though the meat-first menus put meat dishes front and centre, they still listed the vegan/vegetarian dishes as their own category, and so seem to have relatively increased the likelihood that people would choose vegetarian food. “Suddenly, vegetarian dishes weren’t framed as modifications of the ‘main’ option—they were main options in themselves,” says Voss.
This finding only underscored the main takeaway, Voss says, which is that simple changes in how we communicate information can be powerful levers of sustainable behavior. Taking this simple tweak into hospitality and tourism, which are both high-consumption industries, could have an outsized impact. It could also resonate in other environments such as restaurants or even supermarkets, Voss adds.
“It’s a powerful reminder that behaviour change isn’t just about information—it’s about how choices are presented in the first place,” says Voss. “Sustainable choices aren’t just about what people want to do, they’re about what’s easy to do.”
Voss et. al. “Guiding pro-environmental behaviour: examining the impact of cognitive and behavioural interventions on sustainable food choices in hospitality.” Sustainable Tourism. 2025.
Image: ©Getty Images for Unsplash+
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