A Multifaceted Explanation of the Predisposition to Buy Organic Food

Abstract

This study explores whether implicit and explicit attitudes toward organic products explain consumers’ predisposition to buy organic food, considering the hedonic and utilitarian dimensions of attitudes. The data are from an online survey, which included a section on implicit attitudes (measured using an Implicit Association Test) and a section on explicit attitudes. Two products were analyzed using 557 responses from a panel of consumers: chocolate (hedonic-oriented food) and milk (a utilitarian-oriented food). Confirmatory factor analysis and multigroup structural equations were applied to assess the proposed model. Three findings may be highlighted. First, in the model with the lowest entropy, the hedonic and utilitarian dimensions are considered to be independent. Second, different types of attitudes play different roles depending on the product. Finally, implicit attitudes influence the predisposition to buy organic food in the case of pleasure-seeking food but not utilitarian-oriented food. Thus, there is convergence between implicit and explicit attitudes for hedonic-oriented foods and divergence between such attitudes for utilitarian-oriented foods. This study’s value lies in the novel use of implicit attitudes, which have generally been neglected in attitudinal models in the organic food domain.