The Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste<\/strong> scale is a psychometric instrument developed by Audrey De Visser-Amundson, John Peloza, and Mirella Kleijnen (2021)<\/a> to assess the degree, vividness, and cognitive salience with which consumers mentally associate food products\u2014specifically rescued, surplus, or upcycled ingredients\u2014with trash, refuse, decay, and bodily contamination. Embedded within the emerging intersection of consumer behavior<\/a>, environmental psychology, and culinary sensory processing, the scale quantifies spontaneous mental simulation and visual imagery that evoke notions of physical waste upon exposure to rescue-based food marketing. Across multiple laboratory and field investigations, the instrument operates primarily as a unidimensional, three- to four-item construct rated on a 7-point Likert scale<\/a> ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree or via bipolar semantic differential formats measuring vividness and connection. Psychometric evaluations across multiple consumer samples demonstrate robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically exceeding .88 and reaching .94), high composite reliability, solid average variance extracted (AVE > .70), and distinct convergent and discriminant validity against adjacent psychological constructs such as perceived functional risk, nutritional valuation, and generalized pathogen disgust sensitivity. By capturing the subtle, often implicit mental imagery that triggers visceral consumer aversion, this measurement tool provides researchers and sustainable food enterprises with actionable empirical diagnostic power to pinpoint why well-intentioned sustainability and anti-waste marketing initiatives inadvertently trigger visceral rejection, while establishing empirical paths to mitigate negative visual associations<\/span>.<\/p>\n Imagery of food products, physical waste association, mental simulation, rescued food, food waste reduction, consumer disgust, sympathetic magic, contagion theory, sustainable consumer behavior, psychometric evaluation<\/p>\n The scale was developed and validated by an international team of marketing and consumer behavior researchers:<\/p>\n Globally, approximately one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted, prompting urgent interventions across the farm-to-fork continuum. One of the most promising market-based solutions involves commercializing “rescue-based food” (RBF)—food items manufactured from ingredients that were originally discarded, rejected due to superficial aesthetic flaws, surplus supply, or nearing their expiration dates, yet remain perfectly safe and wholesome for consumption. Despite significant environmental and economic rationale, rescue-based food initiatives frequently encounter severe resistance from retail consumers. The primary purpose of the Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste<\/strong> scale is to quantify the cognitive and perceptual mechanism driving this market failure: the involuntary activation of vivid, disgust-eliciting mental imagery connecting wholesome food to physical refuse.<\/p>\n From a theoretical perspective, marketing scholars previously recognized that consumers often express apprehension toward products involving recycled or reused materials. However, traditional models frequently attributed this hesitance to rational risk assessments, such as doubts regarding microbiological safety, structural durability, or price-to-quality ratios. The Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste scale addresses a distinct, emotionally charged perceptual pathway. Rather than measuring a cold, deliberate calculation of functional risk, this scale measures the vivid, sensory-rich mental representations (visual, olfactory, and tactile simulations) wherein the consumer pictures the product sitting in a garbage bin, decomposing alongside spoiled matter, or being handled in unsanitary waste-management streams.<\/p>\n In empirical research, the scale serves as a crucial mediator explaining why promotional cues that highlight the amount of food rescued or the prevention of environmental waste can backfire. While anti-waste messaging is designed to stimulate altruistic and pro-environmental motives, the scale demonstrates that such framing directly primes mental representations of trash, increasing physical waste imagery, which subsequently triggers visceral disgust and depresses purchase intentions, willingness to pay, and product adoption. In commercial and clinical consumer settings, applying this instrument enables marketing strategists, sustainability communicators, and food product designers to pre-test messaging, packaging semantics, and visual branding. By measuring changes on this scale, practitioners can determine whether framing adjustments (such as emphasizing culinary craft, ingredient freshness, or flavor profiles rather than waste diversion) successfully attenuate the cognitive link to refuse, clearing the psychological barriers to sustainable consumption.<\/p>\n The construct assessed by this scale is the salience and vividness of mental imagery linking a consumer consumable product to physical waste<\/em>. Psychologically, mental imagery refers to perceptual representations that occur in the absence of direct sensory input, functioning as a form of quasi-perceptual experience within working memory. In the context of consumer food evaluations, mental imagery operates as an embodied simulation process wherein individuals mentally envision the origin, history, handling, and environmental contexts of a food product.<\/p>\n When consumers evaluate standard consumer packaged goods, their mental simulations tend to focus on consumption experiences: taste, satiety, texture, and social dining contexts. However, when a product is explicitly categorized or framed as “rescued,” “salvaged,” or “diverted from waste streams,” the cognitive schema for “waste” is primed. The psychological construct quantified by De Visser-Amundson, Peloza, and Kleijnen (2021) captures the intensity, visual clarity, and spontaneous accessibility of this specific association. It is defined not merely as a cold semantic belief (e.g., “this product prevented waste”), but as a vivid, associative imagery construct characterized by three core psychological dimensions:<\/p>\n Crucially, this construct diverges from general product quality evaluations. Two products may receive identical scores on perceived nutritional value or economic fairness, but the one eliciting elevated imagery of physical waste will suffer unique psychological penalties driven by disgust. The scale measures this specific, sensory-evocative mental link, providing insight into the automatic, implicit barriers that undermine pro-environmental decision-making.<\/p>\n The scale is rooted in foundational psychological principles derived from disgust theory<\/a>, the law of contagion<\/a> within sympathetic magic, and embodied mental simulation<\/a> theory.<\/p>\n Pioneering anthropological and psychological research by Paul Rozin<\/a>, Carol Nemeroff, and April Fallon demonstrated that human food evaluations are governed by primitive heuristic principles of sympathetic magic, specifically the law of contagion<\/em> (“once in contact, always in contact”). Contagion theory posits that when an entity comes into physical contact with a source of pollution, contaminant, or negative essence, it permanently acquires that negative essence. Critically, this transfer occurs even when the contact is brief, indirect, or purely symbolic, and persists even after thorough, verified physical purification.<\/p>\n De Visser-Amundson, Peloza, and Kleijnen (2021) extended this theoretical framework to modern sustainable product evaluation. Rescued food products are often physically distinct from actual garbage; they are typically premium, untouched surplus items diverted before touching waste bins. Nevertheless, marketing communication that highlights “fighting waste” creates a symbolic cognitive bridge. The consumer’s mind applies the law of contagion, inferring that because the food was “destined for waste,” it has been permanently tainted by the essence of refuse. The scale directly captures the cognitive instantiation of this contagion process.<\/p>\n The second pillar of the theoretical framework is mental simulation and mental imagery processing in consumer decision-making (MacInnis & Price, 1987<\/a>; Elder & Krishna, 2012<\/a>). According to embodied cognition theories, humans process linguistic and visual cues by running internal sensory-motor simulations. When reading the word “rescued from waste,” the consumer does not merely process an abstract semantic node; their brain automatically simulates the visual, tactile, and olfactory experiences associated with waste.<\/p>\n Research on consumer contamination by Morales and Fitzsimons (2005)<\/a> demonstrated that simply placing an unhygienic product (e.g., feminine napkins or trash bags) next to a palatable food product (e.g., potato chips) inside a grocery cart induces emotional disgust and lowers purchase intentions, even when both products are hermetically sealed. The Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste scale builds upon this insight: physical proximity is not required if mental imagery<\/em> creates perceptual proximity. Once the imagery of physical waste is activated in working memory, it operates as an embodied perceptual input, automatically eliciting the evolutionary defense mechanism of pathogen avoidance: disgust.<\/p>\n The scale integrates into a dual-pathway model of consumer evaluation. On one hand, rescue-based marketing appeals to high-order, deliberate, cognitive processes (the moral and environmental value pathway<\/em>), generating positive attitudes toward corporate environmental responsibility. On the other hand, the exact same marketing appeals inadvertently activate the low-order, automatic, sensory-imagery pathway (the physical waste imagery pathway<\/em>), generating visceral revulsion. The psychometric instrument was engineered specifically to isolate and quantify this second, counterproductive pathway, allowing scholars to document how the sensory-affective response systematically undermines cognitive pro-environmental intentions.<\/p>\n The scale underwent empirical validation across a series of controlled experimental studies and structural equation modeling procedures reported in De Visser-Amundson, Peloza, and Kleijnen (2021), demonstrating high construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.<\/p>\n Construct validity was established through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across diverse consumer samples evaluating multiple product categories (e.g., preserved jams, pre-cut vegetables, bakery goods, and soups made from surplus ingredients). Factor loadings for the items consistently exceeded .82, with several items exhibiting standardized loadings above .90, demonstrating that the items reliably capture the shared latent construct. The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values across experimental studies consistently exceeded the recommended .50 threshold, regularly falling between .72 and .84. These high AVE metrics confirm that the variance captured by the construct is significantly greater than the variance attributable to measurement error.<\/p>\n To confirm that the scale measures a construct distinct from related attitudes and emotional reactions, discriminant validity was evaluated using the Fornell-Larcker criterion<\/a> and the Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations. The squared correlation between the imagery of physical waste scale and competing constructs—including generalized disgust sensitivity, perceived nutritional degradation, brand trust, general risk perception, and environmental concern—was significantly lower than the AVE for each corresponding latent variable. Specifically:<\/p>\n Predictive and nomological validity were demonstrated through mediated regression models. The scale successfully predicted downstream behavioral outcomes across multiple scenarios:<\/p>\n The reliability of the Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste scale has been demonstrated across multiple independent samples in consumer research laboratories and online panel environments (e.g., Prolific, Amazon Mechanical Turk), spanning diverse national contexts (North American and Western European consumer cohorts).<\/p>\n Across the experimental studies documented by De Visser-Amundson, Peloza, and Kleijnen (2021), internal consistency metrics were well above accepted standards for psychometric research:<\/p>\n While the scale is primarily deployed as an acute state measure responsive to marketing framing manipulations, stability checks in control conditions revealed high test-retest correlations ($r > .80$<\/span>) when measured across short intervals. Furthermore, multi-group confirmatory factor analysis confirmed metric and scalar invariance across gender and age groups, establishing that the instrument measures the underlying construct consistently across diverse demographic segments.<\/p>\n The latent structure of the instrument was confirmed using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) during the scale development and validation phases.<\/p>\n During preliminary pilot testing, items measuring waste association, unhygienic origins, sensory disgust, and refuse visualization were submitted to principal axis factoring with promax (oblique) rotation. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy consistently exceeded $.86$<\/span>, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was highly significant ($p < .001$<\/span>), indicating sample suitability for factor extraction.<\/p>\n A single dominant factor emerged, with eigenvalues exceeding $2.8$, accounting for over $72%$<\/span> of the total variance. All candidate items loaded heavily onto this primary factor, with individual factor loadings ranging from $.81$<\/span> to $.93$<\/span>, and cross-loadings remaining negligible (all < $.20$<\/span>). This provided clear initial evidence for a parsimonious, unidimensional scale structure.<\/p>\n To formally test the factor structure, structural equation modeling was conducted across multiple validation samples. The unidimensional model demonstrated good fit to the empirical data across all key goodness-of-fit indices:<\/p>\n Competing models specifying multi-dimensional structures (e.g., separating visual imagery from semantic waste association) failed to achieve superior fit and resulted in excessively high factor correlations ($r > .88$<\/span>), confirming that the unidimensional formulation represents the most parsimonious, psychometrically sound operationalization of the construct.<\/p>\n The Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste scale is a self-report instrument designed for either independent psychometric administration or seamless integration into broader consumer survey panels.<\/p>\n The scale was developed and published in 2021<\/strong> by the American Marketing Association (AMA) in the Journal of Marketing Research<\/em>:<\/p>\n The following academic publications provide the foundational theoretical framework, psychometric validation data, and methodological background for the scale:<\/p>\n A psychometric review of the Imagery of Food Products Linked to Physical Waste scale, measuring the vivid mental associations between rescued food items and physical refuse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[1076,1833,2],"tags":[19376,7000,17586,2808,6,19377,18374],"class_list":["post-6081","psych_scale","type-psych_scale","status-publish","hentry","category-consumer-psychology","category-environmental-psychology","category-psychometrics","tag-consumer-disgust","tag-contagion-theory","tag-food-waste","tag-mental-imagery","tag-psychometrics","tag-rescued-food","tag-sustainable-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/6081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/psych_scale"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/6081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}2. Keywords<\/h2>\n
3. Authors<\/h2>\n
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4. Purpose<\/h2>\n
5. Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
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6. Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
Sympathetic Magic and the Law of Contagion<\/h3>\n
Mental Simulation and Embodied Cognition<\/h3>\n
The Dual-Pathway Processing Paradigm<\/h3>\n
7. Validity<\/h2>\n
Construct and Convergent Validity<\/h3>\n
Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
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Predictive and Nomological Validity<\/h3>\n
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8. Reliability<\/h2>\n
Internal Consistency<\/h3>\n
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Test-Retest Stability and Cross-Sample Robustness<\/h3>\n
9. Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)<\/h3>\n
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)<\/h3>\n
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10. Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
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12. References<\/h2>\n
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13. Items of the Scale<\/h2>\n