Mapping Moral Judgments of Food Waste: Moving Beyond Truisms

Why do people see wasting food as immoral? While previous studies on food-wastingbehaviour have explored its moral significance, they often lacked a clear scientificoperationalisation of morality. This project bridges the gap between research on food-wastingbehaviour and moral psychology by mapping folk moral intuitions about food waste onto thetheory-driven Morality-as-Cooperation (MAC) framework.Across two studies, we identified common folk moral intuitions about why food wastingbehaviour is considered immoral and compared them to MAC-based moral domains. We examinedhow these folk intuitions relate to MAC domains and tested how both influence food-wastingbehaviours. The strongest folk predictors of food waste condemnation were concerns for nature,thriftiness, and world hunger, while the key MAC-based intuitions were Fairness (resourcedistribution), Deference (authority and tradition), and Group Loyalty (community commitment),with Fairness underpinning most folk intuitions. Both folk and cooperative moral intuitionspredicted food wasting behaviours, such as discarding unpalatable foods, overshopping, mealplanning, and food sharing. Folk intuitions also mediated the link between MAC-based moralconcerns (Fairness and Reciprocity) and food-wasting behaviours.These findings ground folk moral beliefs in a scientific framework, providing a moresystematic understanding of food waste morality and offering new insights for more effectiveinterventions.