Food-Related Social Interaction Fosters Collective Action and Identification with Climate Action Supporters: An Experimental Study in Virtual Reality

Social interaction is theorized to be a key mechanism for crystallizing environmental identities, promoting individual and collective action, and through these embedding societal shifts toward sustainability. This preregistered study utilizes networked immersive virtual reality (VR) to investigate these processes in a controlled setting. In a preregistered lab-in-the-field study, participants (255 tested, 194 analyzed) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1) social interaction with environmental feedback; (2) social interaction without environmental feedback, or; (3) no-social interaction without environmental feedback. All participants engaged in a sustainable cooking task in VR, either alone or in a dyad based on the interaction condition. Environmental feedback was achieved by visualizing the impact of food choices dynamically as participants engaged in the cooking task or by not providing such a visualization. Consistent with theory, social interaction conditions significantly increased both social identification with climate-action supporters and collective action intentions compared to the individual condition, and in combination with environmental feedback further increased the emotional experience of hope. The social interaction condition coupled with environmental feedback also led to significantly higher intentions to reduce meat consumption compared to interaction without feedback. No direct effects of conditions were observed on objectively assessed pro-environmental behavior. Exploratory analyses revealed that social identification was significantly correlated with all behavioral predictors with correlations ranging from high for collective action and meat reduction to low for objectively assessed pro-environmental behavior. The study underscoresthe influential role of social interaction in fostering social identification and through this potentially shifting collective, and sometimes individual, pro-environmental behavior.