Why Do People Like Natural? Instrumental and Ideational Bases for the Naturalness Preference

Abstract

Naturalness preference refers to the tendency to prefer natural things to otherwise equivalent unnatural alternatives. Previous research suggests that the naturalness preference is largely due to ideational reasons (moral or aesthetic appeals), rather than instrumental reasons (inferred functional superiority), because the natural and unnatural alternatives were specified as identical. The current studies showed that people do not always believe that natural and unnatural alternatives can be identical. Responses that in previous studies would have been interpreted as ideational‐based naturalness preference were correlated with beliefs in instrumental advantages of natural products. We propose that instrumental and ideational reasons are closely connected, and instrumental beliefs may contribute to the “natural is better” heuristic. The financial consequence of naturalness preference was also demonstrated.