Assessing the unfamiliar: The case of cultured meat

Summary

Technological innovations, including in the agri-food sector, are an essential part of climate action to reach sustainability goals and their success depends on consumer acceptance. Even when people have no knowledge about an object, they can produce an evaluation that informs behavior. As technological innovations have meaning in real life, this thesis focused on evaluations toward realistic unfamiliar objects and used cultured meat as example.

This thesis shows that realistic unfamiliar objects can be distinguished from familiar and fictional unfamiliar objects in how their evaluations are constructed. The initial automatically activated evaluation of realistic unfamiliar objects depends on categorization. Whether it fits into a category depends on collectively shared social practices that people perform in everyday live. Cultured meat did not belong to a specific category as it shared important similarities and dissimilarities with the mutually exclusive categories meat and meat substitutes. Newly acquired information about realistic unfamiliar objects is processed within existing knowledge structures and related to social practices. With knowledge about realistic unfamiliar objects still being limited, the deliberately constructed evaluation is easily influenced by newly acquired information.