Organic - an irrational choice?

This is not exactly in the theme of my regular blog, but a predictably irrational experiment I carried out to test people's preferences for organic food.

Introduction

Every time I go grocery shopping I am confronted with making horrible decisions. Do I get the healthy, live longer, get prettier, and expensive organic variation of an item or do I go for the regular, pesticide-filled, “animals-have-died-because-of-you” non-organic grocery that cost me half of the money? Secretly, when nobody is watching I sneak the non-organic milk in my basket and convince myself that when I get a real job I will start to save the world and myself and buy organic food.   

However, when the topic lands on organic food at dinner parties I like to join the choir of organic-lovers and say that I too prefer the healthier and – the implied – better choice. 

I figured that there would be more like me out there. People who will say that they prefer organic food, not only because it is better for them, but also because they can tell a different in taste.

Thus, I decided to do an experiment with random people to see if their preference in a certain grocery is irrational and changes if they are told that one is organic and one is not. 

The experiment 

I wanted to test out my participants’ organic preferences on a grocery that did not have a lot of taste variation within the same item. That ruled out most fruits and I decided to carry out my experiment with roasted and salted cashew nuts. Cashew nuts have a distinct taste and the variations within cashews are often only determined by the roasting and flavor.

I got one bag of non-organic cashews at 41 cents per ounce and another bag of organic cashews at 61 cents per ounce. The organic cashews were almost 50 % more expensive than the other bag.

I ran my experiment on three groups. To count for any minor taste difference I started out by asking a control group which nut they preferred the most without telling them that one was organic. By doing that I could later on in the experiment see if more people preferred the organic, when they were told that it actually was organic. 

I then asked my second experiment group which cashew the liked the most by taste and told them that one nut was organic and the other was not. The purpose of this group was to see if the participants were influence by the organic choice.

With the third group I inversed the experiment. I asked the group to taste the two different cashew nuts and told them that the non-organic nut was in deed organic and vice versa. The purpose of the third group was again to record if the information that one nut was organic had significance and to rule out any taste difference. 

Hypothesis

My hypothesis was based on my presumptions that people are not making rational decisions when they have to choose between two items in which they have a preference for one of them. Like experiments with Coca-Cola and Pepsi many participants have found themselves choosing their not preferable brand of soda in a blind testing, but continued buying what they preferred in the first place. I expected that the same irrationality could be applied to organic food and that people would choose organic only when they were told it was organic and not because they liked the taste better.

Therefore, my hypothesis was that nearly everyone would choose the organic cashew nut when faced with a choice between the organic and non-organic. Further, I expected that there would be no difference in preferences in the control group.

Results

The experiments went almost as I expected. In the control group the organic cashew nut was low on popularity, but it gained a lot of support when the participants knew that the nut was organic.

In the control group only 10 % preferred the organic nut, 40 % chose the non-organic nut and 50 % did not have a preference at all. The comments on the two nuts were that the non-organic was saltier and therefore tastier, but the organic was crunchier. The overall result from the control group was the organic nut was not preferable. 

That changed as soon as it got a label on it. Now 38 % of the participants wanted to go for the more expensive organic cashew nut. However, the non-organic nut still got the most votes and ended up with the remaining 62 % simply because it was tastier, most participants said.

When it came to run the experiment on the third group I already expected the non-organic nut labeled as organic to get the most votes, since it apparently tasted better. I was right. 70 % went for the non-organic nut in disguise as organic whereas the real organic nut only was preferred by 30 %. 

Conclusion

From the results of my experiment I can conclude that the organic label makes people irrational to some extent. When not confronted with an organic awareness almost none of the participants chose the organic nut. But as soon as people were aware of the difference in the nuts 40 % chose to go for the organic alternative. Even when the nuts were deliberately mislabeled most people preferred the organic nut, but it seems, as the mislabeled cashew actually did taste better. 

I had expected that almost everyone would have chosen the organic cashew nut though, when they knew the difference. 

In any way, this experiments proves that an organic label can make people irrational and go for the organic choice even if it does taste as good.