Improving Understanding of Consumer Attitudes toward Cultured Meat through the Lens of Online Media Framing

Wide-scale commercialization of cultured meat, produced from in vitro-grown animal stem cells, is still a long way off because of technical, regulatory and, above all, social acceptability constraints. As a result, despite the advancement of knowledge, it is difficult to predict whether this innovation will be commonly accepted. The concept of media framing is key to better understanding individuals’ decision-making and mental interpretative patterns in relation to cultured meat adoption. This research therefore analyzes the role of media framing (namely the social media platform Twitter) on the components of consumer attitudes (cognitive, affective, and conative) in relation to cultured meat. A total of 23 020 publications and 38 531 comments were analyzed qualitatively (content analysis) and quantitatively (MANOVA). This study showed that media-framed posts influenced consumer attitudes more than did non-media-framed posts. Although the results indicate that the different types of media framing (ethical, intrinsic, informational, and belief) do not exert the same influence on each attitude component, they suggest that posts combining the ethical, intrinsic, and informational media frames have a greater impact on the acceptability of cultured meat and that the belief frame is equally important, particularly for the behavioral component. Relevant implications can be drawn for authorities and businesses on the use of differentiated education and marketing strategies