Naturalness seeking minds: The cognitive foundations of naturalness bias in consumer food choice

Naturalness bias refers to a tendency to favor products that are perceived as natural over synthetic or industrial goods. This bias has been observed in various product categories, including drugs, food and cosmetics. Although previous research has primarily focused on identifying the different motives underlying this preference, there is limited understanding of the cognitive foundations of this bias which remains undertheorized. The present paper seeks to address this gap by theoretically framing the phenomenon in terms of a by-product of the representativeness heuristic, which involves estimating the likelihood that an object belongs to a category based on its similarity to a pre-existing prototype. In this context, judging the naturalness of a product entails comparing it to a set of stereotyped attributes of “naturalness”. Among these, this paper discusses the role of aesthetic randomness and unusual colors/shapes as possible cues of naturalness, with a specific focus on the role of cosmetic imperfections and abnormalities. A better theoretical understanding of how naturalness bias develops may have practical implications for developing consumer education campaigns and mitigating food waste. • Previous studies showed that people have an automatic preference for products perceived as natural, compared to their conventional counterparts • Literature has focused on explaining why that is the case, but cognitive processes explaining how we infer the naturalness has not received attention • Here we propose representativeness heuristic as the theoretical account of how we assess naturalness of a food product based on stereotypes of randomness (e.g., cosmetic imperfections in foods) • We propose a threshold model which may explain contradictory findings on consumer behavior with respect to heuristic use of ugliness as a cue for simplifying choices • Such debate has implications both for policy aimed at increasing acceptance rate of cosmetically imperfect foods (and thus, waste) and for theoretical research