Strategies To Provide Students And Faculties’ Awareness Of Food Waste
As an advisor of the university, I would like our campus to be an environmentally friendly community and bring awareness of pro-environmental behavior to our students and faculties. The topic I would like to focus on first is food waste. According to the statistics, nearly half of the food produced has never been eaten. On the other hand, one out of nine people on the planet is having difficulty in having a meal or starving. For most people, the reasons behind food consumption are the individual’s unconscious of the actual proportion of food they need when eating. As well as the public’s ignorant attitude toward the global issue caused by food wasting.
The persuasion strategies I use to promote this message are the central and peripheral route of persuasion. The central route to persuasion can influence an individual’s attitude by presenting evidence and logic while the peripheral route uses emotional appeal and superficial causes. The central route is most effective when you want to change an explicit attitude and desire for an enduring change. However, the peripheral route focus on building positive implicit associations over time. An experiment conducted in 2016 used persuasive techniques to strengthen people’s pro-environmental attitude. In this study, the participants completed an online pretest about their environmental attitudes. Afterward, they were randomly assigned to two groups. One group watched a television clip included pro-environmental messages, the other group viewed a television clip without pro-environmental messages. Participants then completed a survey to report their intent to perform eco-friendly behaviors. The conclusion indicated the group which viewed the pro-environmental messages had a significantly higher intention of performing eco-friendly behaviors.
The finding in this research can use to form a new policy on campus to decrease food waste. According to this experiment, I would suggest the university to use videos and signs to explain why food waste is an issue and ways we can prevent it at the campus’ dining hall and food court. As well as using research articles a statistics numbers in the message to further inform the audiences. As a result, this is a central route to persuasion using logic and evidence. Furthermore, hire happy and attractive students in the video to demonstrate the ways we can prevent food waste. This is using the peripheral route to build positive implicit associations.
I am positive that using the strategies mentioned above can bring our students and faculties’ awareness of food waste and make our campus a pro-environmental community.
