Should I Buy Organic Food? A Psychological Perspective on Purchase Decisions - Organic Food and Agriculture: New Trends and Developments in the Social Sciences - page 41

part of a universalistic value orientation. What is interesting here is that preference for
organic food can be attributed to two very different, almost opposed value orientations. In a
similar approach Baker et al. (2004) compared a sample of German with a sample of UK
citizens in another qualitative study and identified health/enjoyment, belief in nature, and
animal welfare as the most prominent value orientations driving organic food consumption
in Germany, whereas in the UK health/enjoyment/achievement and respect for
others/workers emerged as the dominant value orientations, interestingly omitting nature
totally. Again the interesting finding is that organic food consumption can have motivations
that stem from very different basic value orientations in the Schwartz system.
Two conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of the relations between values and
organic food choice: (a) the relation is usually rather weak and indirect, mediated by other
variables such as beliefs and attitudes, (b) different, sometimes even opposing value
orientations are potentially motivating organic food choice. Some people prefer organic food
because they value their health and believe in positive health effects of organic food (value
dimension: security), some people prefer organic food, because they want to protect nature,
animals, or workers (value dimension: universalism), some prefer organic food because of
hedonistic motives (e.g., better taste).
2.2 Attitudes
Eagly and Chaiken (1993) define attitudes as “ a psychological tendency that is expressed by
evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour (page 1)”. This definition
names three key features of an attitude: (a) it is linked to an entity (an object, a person or a
behaviour), (b) it includes a general evaluation of this entity as desirable or not, and (c) is a
psychological predisposition that might or might not be expressed in certain behaviours.
Fishbein and Ajzen (1975) conceive of attitudes as the general summation of all activated
beliefs about the attitude object, with beliefs being the likelihood of a certain outcome of a
course of action times its evaluation. Attitudes are in contrast to values connected to specific
objects and therefor much less general and transsituational.
Already in the previous section attitudes were introduced as potential mediators between
very general value orientations and consumption of organic food or at least the intention to
do that. A lot of papers have analysed the relation between attitudes and purchase of
organic food, the most interesting are outlining what the most important positive and
negative beliefs about organic food and conventional alternatives are that constitute the
attitude. A short summary will be given in the remainder of this section. Storstad and
Bjørkhaug (2003) analysed attitudes among farmers and consumers in Norway and found
that attitudes consisting of pro-environmental beliefs were the only psychological variable
positively influencing the purchase of organic food. Pro-animal welfare attitudes were not
important, basically because in the case of Norway also conventional agriculture has the
image of being animal friendly (Nygård & Storstad, 1998). In a study with inhabitants on a
small Scottish island Michaelidou and Hassan (2008) were able to show that the link
between positive attitudes towards organic food and the intention to buy it was strong.
Furthermore, they found that concerns for food safety, health consciousness and an ethical
self-identity were components that significantly contributed to this attitude. Based on data
from a national survey Onyango et al. (2007) identified the following food attributes as the
most important components of a pro-organic food attitude in the US: (a) naturalness, (b)
vegetarian-vegan, (c) production location, (d) familiarity (negative impact). De Magistris