Identifying Personal and Social Drivers of Dietary Patterns: An Agent-Based Model of Dutch Consumer Behavior

Understanding the drivers of dietary decisions is crucial for encouraging and facilitating environmentally sustainable consumption patterns. Previous work has focused on the utility that consumers place on factors such as price, quality, and ethics when making dietary decisions, or on the effects of personal values and peer influence on consumption of individual products. However, less attention has been paid to the interacting roles of values, perceptions, and social networks in dietary decision-making, and how these relate to mismatches between values and diet choice. Here, we develop an agent-based model of individual consumers making choices between five possible diets: omnivore, flexitarian, pescatarian, vegetarian, or vegan. Each consumer makes decisions based on personal constraints and values, and their perceptions of how well each diet matches with those values. Consumers can also be influenced by each other’s perceptions via interaction across three social networks: household members, friends, and acquaintances. We show that consumers primarily make decisions based on cost and taste, even when they value ethics and health, and illustrate three potential causes of the ‘attitude-behavior gap’ between ethical motivations and diet choice. This highlights the potential for both policy-driven changes to pricing structures, and increased awareness around sustainability and health attributes of different diets, in overcoming constraints and misperceptions to facilitate transitions to sustainable diets.