Evidence for the coincidence effect in environmental judgments: Why isn't it easy to correctly identify environmentally friendly food products?

Abstract

The coincidence effect-a phenomenon known in similarity research-suggests that people assign extra weight to features that 2 items have in common. The role of this effect in 2 kinds of environmental judgments about food products is investigated. Task 1 ("How environmentally friendly is a particular food product compared with a reference?") provided some evidence for the coincidence hypothesis. However, Task 2 ("How much more or less environmentally harmful is a food product compared with a standard?") showed anticoincidence. People's subjective evaluations were examined in regard to how they matched or deviated from objective measures of harmful environmental consequences related to food products. Coincidence and anticoincidence help to explain when and why subjective and objective evaluations may diverge.