Research Paper on Purchasing Products From Fukushima

Abstract

Japanese consumers are still hesitant to purchase products from Fukushima, although seven years have passed since the Fukushima nuclear disaster and these products are officially considered safe. In this study, we examined whether Japanese consumers have negative implicit attitudes towards agricultural and aquatic products from the Fukushima region and whether these attitudes are independent of their explicit beliefs. Japanese students completed an implicit association test and a questionnaire to assess their implicit and explicit attitudes towards products from Fukushima relative to another region. The sample size for the two studies conducted was 40 and because it was more than 30 it was able to produce accurate results. The results reliably demonstrated that the public has negative implicit attitudes towards Fukushima products, whereas their explicit attitudes are consistently positive. These observations predominantly held for participants living close to Fukushima (Tokyo) as opposed to participants living far away (Hiroshima). Furthermore, individual differences in aversion to germs contributed to the implicit attitudes; the implicit negative attitudes were attenuated amongst the participants with relatively low hostilities to sprouts. These results suggest that the implicit attitudes associated with the behavioral immune system may underlie the hesitation to purchase products from Fukushima. Behavioral immune system is a psychological mechanism created to identify the presence of a disease causing parasite in the surrounding and respond to it in a way that prevent it.

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Introduction

Although several years have passed since the Tohoku Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, which occurred in 2011, Japanese consumers are still hesitant to purchase agricultural and aquatic products from Fukushima (Fukushima Prefecture, 2016; Hangui, 2014, Consumer Affairs Agency, 2017). It may have been plausible to refrain from consuming Fukushima products immediately after the disaster because of the widespread and unreliable, reputationally damaging information regarding radioactive contamination. However, these products are now officially safe to buy (Fukushima Prefecture, 2013). Hence, consumers no longer have any grounds for avoiding them.

Nevertheless, this hesitancy, which is a response to the social stigma against Fukushima products, persists. This is causing severe economic damage (i.e., a collapse in the price, Central Union of Agricultural Co-operatives, 2011; Fukushima Minyu Shimbun Sha, 2012; Ichinose, 2012). Social stigma is a way of discriminating someone or animals on the basis of perceived social features which is used to differentiate them from other social group. Usually, they are associated to culture, gender and even race even health. For example, the market prices of beef, peaches, and rice, which are specialties from the Fukushima region, have continuously decreased (e.g., by 9.3%, 4.9%, and to 23.3% in 2017) concerning the national average because of the disaster (Reconstruction Agency, 2018).

Such hesitancy in purchasing products from Fukushima can be interpreted in the context of error-management theory (Haselton & Buss, 2000). According to this theory, an individual makes two possible errors (type I being false-positive and type II being false-negative errors) when deciding in an uncertain scenario. Mostly, consumers tend to be afraid of making a type II error judgment, in which they mistake products that are dangerous as being safe. Consequently, type I error judgments, where safe products are mistaken as dangerous, are more likely. In short, this hesitancy is caused by consumers' vigilance about products from Fukushima.

To prevent reputational damage to products from Fukushima and correct consumers' overcautious attitudes towards them, local and national governments have repeatedly released information regarding their safety, evidenced by screening for radioactive contamination (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2018). Due to such attempts, the latest survey research demonstrates that the number of consumers who care about the production area has drastically decreased and that nearly 80% of consumers have no concerns about the safety of Fukushima products (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, 2018). Furthermore, consumers do not currently have "explicitly" negative attitudes towards products from Fukushima, at least on paper (Kudo & Nagaya, 2017; Miura, Kusumi, & Ogura, 2015). If this is so, then why do they still hesitate to purchase these products? It appears that another factor, which we consider to be their "implicit" attitudes, underlies this hesitation. It has been suggested that explicit and implicit attitudes differ from one another, particularly concerning social stigma (Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). Thus, we hypothesized that, rather than explicit attitudes, negative implicit attitudes underlie the hesitancy regarding the purchase of products from Fukushima.

However, before we can resolve this significant hypothesis, it is necessary to validate the fundamental aspects of our interpretation, namely: whether consumers indeed have negative implicit attitudes towards agricultural and aquatic products from the Fukushima region and whether these attitudes are independent of their explicit beliefs. We used the implicit association test (IAT), which is a well-known method for measuring implicit attitudes related to a target attribute relative to another (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). In this study, the participants completed both an IAT and a questionnaire to assess their implicit and explicit attitudes towards products from Fukushima, relative to products from another region.

Note that recent research based on the IAT has already reported that Japanese people show somewhat positive, not negative, implicit attitudes towards products from Fukushima (Kudo & Nagaya, 2017). However, we believe that the interpretation of the data from that is limited for the following two reasons. First, the study focused on the effects of a persuasive message on consumers' attitudes, and thus the implicit attitudes were only measured after manipulating the participants with this message, and the questionnaire measures explicit attitudes. Thus, it was likely that the participants' implicit attitudes had been biased by the exposure to the preceding message and the questionnaire. Second, the authors did not provide any information regarding where the participants lived. Because of the importance of (or the amount of exposure to) the Fukushima brand increases as the consumers' physical distance from the area where the disaster occurred decreases, it is plausible that consumers' attitudes towards Fukushima depend on where they live. We have not yet determined whether consumers' implicit attitudes are modulated by where they live (Kudo & Nagaya, 2017). In this study, excluding the potential confounding factors mentioned, we investigated whether explicit and implicit attitudes vary as a function of location. This is an essential factor to be taken into account when marketing products from Fukushima.

Experiment 1

In the first experiment, we investigated (1) whether consumers have negative implicit attitudes towards products from the Fukushima region, (2) whether these are independent of their explicit positions, and (3) whether a consumer's perspective is modulated by where they live. First, the participants completed the IAT. This provided a measure of their implicit attitudes. Then they answered a questionnaire that measured their explicit attitudes. We recruited participants from two geographically distant areas (Hiroshima and Tokyo, which are 811 km and 239 km away from Fukushima as the crow flies). Then we compared the participants' attitudes.

Implicit attitudes are attitudes that are not consciously acknowledged but that are expressed through judgments or actions (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). Inherent biases are sometimes referred to as "automatic" or "unconscious" stereotypes (Levy & Banaji, 2002). These attitudes seem to be based on societal norms that become incorporated into individuals' memories and personal judgments (Agerstrom, Bjorklund, & Carlsson, 2011). Because individuals are not necessarily aware of the implicit attitudes, they hold it is unlikely that they will alter their results on an implicit measure due to social desirability bias (McCaughey & Strohmer, 2005). This can make implicit attitudes hard to measure though, as participants are not necessarily able to describe these ideas on an explicit measure. So many researchers use Implicit Association Tests.

Implicit Association Test (IAT) is designed to measure the implicit attitudes that may exist on an unconscious level. IAT complete this goal by examining the automatic associations a person holds between a construct and an attribute (Thomas, Smith & Bell, 2007). These measures are based on the assumption that it is easier to behaviorally respond to a strong association than to a weak association. To take a computer-based IAT, a participant sees a sequence of stimuli (words or pictures) and press one of two response keys to identify the category affiliation of each stimulus. The incentives will belong to one of four categories: two target categories (contrasting attitude objects, such as flowers/insects) and two valence categories (indicators of evaluation, such as good/bad). The procedure differs participants' performance speed on a corresponding, compared with an incongruent trial. In a corresponding trial block, participants use one key to respond to one of the target categories and all positive stimuli (e.g., flowers and right), and another key to return to the other target category and all negative stimuli (e.g., insects and severe).

In an incongruent trial block, the valence categories are switched: in this example, one key will correspond to flowers/bad and insects/good. Which pairing is assigned to which trial block is arbitrary, but irrelevant to the results as the order of presentation is usually counterbalanced between participants. Participants are given several practice trial blocks before each congruent/incongruent trial to help them habituate to the new pairing; however, these will typically be excluded from analyses. Participants are encouraged to respond as quickly as possible, but without making too many errors. Responses below or above specific response latencies (usually <300ms and >3,000ms) are typically discarded. The reason for this is because a swift response is likely to have been made accidentally or in error, while an answer which is too long is indicative of a deliberative, explicit response rather than a response made by implicit associations (Dasgupta, McGhee, & Greenwald, 2000). Finally, response times on error trials are meaningless to the assessment of an implicit attitude and for this reason, are also excluded from analyses. Response latencies on the congruent and incongruent test are then synthesized into a calculation of relative preference. Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji (2003) recommend the IAT-D, an algorithm which calculates the difference between mean performance in the congruent and incongruent block and then divides it by the standard deviation of trials in both neighborhoods.

Explicit attitudes are a person's beliefs that are consciously present and that the individual acknowledges possessing (McCaughey and Strohmer, 2005). Explicit attitudes can be a revision or an affirmation of implicit bias. Individuals n...