Although attitudinal conflict about eating meat is widespread and may influence the effectiveness of interventions for meat reduction, little is known about the underlying dynamics. The present research examines meat-related conflict and its role in intervention effectiveness by adopting a temporal perspective. First, we propose a temporal framework of conflict emergence and resolution, tested in a preregistered experience sampling study (ESM, N = 462, 18,586 observations). Process-tracing shows that decision-making during food choices, in particular, elicited conflict due to heightened cognitive accessibility of meat's positive and negative aspects (attitudinal ambivalence). The conflict faded only gradually, but it was more effectively downregulated when individuals ate meat despite behavior-inconsistent evaluations (cognitive dissonance). However, this decline was temporary, and the conflict resurfaced. People engaged in dissonance reduction by initially denying responsibility for eating meat and subsequently aligning their attitudes. Second, we will present ongoing work examining the implications of our temporal framework for intervention research. As attitudinal conflicts can influence persuadability, our ESM data provide data-driven predictions about daily fluctuations in intervention effectiveness. We probe these predictions by modelling daily fluctuations in intervention effectiveness in pre-existing datasets and examining their alignment with the temporal dynamics of meat-related conflict.
Altogether, this research elucidates the sequential processes underlying how people struggle with meat consumption in daily life and proposes systematic variation in intervention responsiveness both within and between people.