Portioning meat and vegetables in four different out of home settings: A win-win for guests, chefs and the planet.

Individuals increasingly consume their meals away from home. This article describes a series of studies that examined the effects of meals with reduced amounts of meat and increased amounts of vegetables on food consumption, waste and guest satisfaction in four real-life restaurant settings in the Netherlands: an a-la-carte restaurant, six company canteens, a self-service restaurant, and a buffet restaurant, including nearly 1500 participants in total. The four studies in these four different out of home settings consistently showed that adapting portion sizes of meat and vegetables was effective to reduce meat consumption and increase vegetable consumption, while maintaining high guest satisfaction. Guest satisfaction even increased when vegetables were presented and prepared in a more attractive and tasty way. Thus, adapting portion sizes of meat and vegetables provides a viable strategy to stimulate healthy and environmentally sustainable consumption patterns in out of home settings.

Can a virtual supermarket bring realism into the lab? Comparing shopping behavior using virtual and pictorial store representations to behavior in a physical store.

Immersive virtual reality techniques present new opportunities for research into consumer behavior. The current study examines whether the increased realism of a virtual store compared to pictorial (2D) stimuli elicits consumer behavior that is more in line with behavior in a physical store. We examine the number, variety, and type of products selected, amount of money spent, and responses to price promotions and shelf display, in three product categories (fruit & vegetables, milk, and biscuits). We find that virtual reality elicits behavior that is more similar to behavior in the physical store compared to the picture condition for the number of products selected (Milk: Mstore = 1.19, Mvirtual = 1.53, Mpictures = 2.58) and amount of money spent (Milk: Mstore = 1.27, Mvirtual = 1.53, Mpictures = 2.60 Euro), and for the selection of products from different areas of the shelf, both vertically (purchases from top shelves, milk and biscuits: Pstore = 21.6%, Pvirtual = 33.4%, Ppictures = 50.0%) and horizontally (purchase from left shelf, biscuits: Pstore = 35.5%, Pvirtual = 53.3%, Ppictures = 66.7%). This indicates that virtual reality can improve realism in responses to shelf allocation. Virtual reality was not able to diminish other differences between lab and physical store: participants bought more products and spent more money (for biscuits and fruit & vegetables), bought more national brands, and responded more strongly to price promotions in both virtual reality and pictorial representations than in the physical store. Implications for the use of virtual reality in studies of consumer food choice behavior as well as for future improvement of virtual reality techniques are discussed.

Personal experience and reputation interact in human decisions to help reciprocally.

There is ample evidence that human cooperative behaviour towards other individuals is often conditioned on information about previous interactions. This information derives both from personal experience (direct reciprocity) and from experience of others (i.e. reputation; indirect reciprocity). Direct and indirect reciprocity have been studied separately, but humans often have access to both types of information. Here, we experimentally investigate information use in a repeated helping game. When acting as donor, subjects can condition their decisions to help recipients with both types of information at a small cost to access such information. We find that information from direct interactions weighs more heavily in decisions to help, and participants tend to react less forgivingly to negative personal experience than to negative reputation. Moreover, effects of personal experience and reputation interact in decisions to help. If a recipient's reputation is positive, the personal experience of the donor has a weak effect on the decision to help, and vice versa. Yet if the two types of information indicate conflicting signatures of helpfulness, most decisions to help follow personal experience. To understand the roles of direct and indirect reciprocity in human cooperation, they should be studied in concert, not in isolation.

"A 30% chance of rain tomorrow": how does the public understand probabilistic weather forecasts?

The weather forecast says that there is a "30% chance of rain," and we think we understand what it means. This quantitative statement is assumed to be unambiguous and to convey more information than does a qualitative statement like "It might rain tomorrow." Because the forecast is expressed as a single-event probability, however, it does not specify the class of events it refers to. Therefore, even numerical probabilities can be interpreted by members of the public in multiple, mutually contradictory ways. To find out whether the same statement about rain probability evokes various interpretations, we randomly surveyed pedestrians in five metropolises located in countries that have had different degrees of exposure to probabilistic forecasts--Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Milan, and New York. They were asked what a "30% chance of rain tomorrow" means both in a multiple-choice and a free-response format. Only in New York did a majority of them supply the standard meteorological interpretation, namely, that when the weather conditions are like today, in 3 out of 10 cases there will be (at least a trace of) rain the next day. In each of the European cities, this alternative was judged as the least appropriate. The preferred interpretation in Europe was that it will rain tomorrow "30% of the time," followed by "in 30% of the area." To improve risk communication with the public, experts need to specify the reference class, that is, the class of events to which a single-event probability refers.