Social influence and meat-eating behaviour – An agent-based model

Humans are social animals. Even the very personal decision of what someone eats is influenced by others around them. In this study, we propose four social interaction mechanisms driven by social identity that affect a person’s decision to eat or not eat meat. Using data from the British Social Attitude Survey in 2014, we operationalise social identity in an agent-based model to study the effect of social interactions on the spread of meat-eating behaviour in the British population. We find that social interactions are crucial in determining the spread of meat-eating behaviour. In order to bring about large-scale behavioural changes at the system level, people need to 1) have a strong openness to influences from both in-group and out-group members who have a different dietary behaviour, and 2) have a weak tendency to reinforce their current behaviour after seeing in-group members sharing the same behaviour. The agent-based model is shown to be a useful tool to operationalise social theories in a well-defined context, and to upscale the system to study its dynamic evolutions under different scenarios.