The psychology of recycled water: Factors predicting disgust and willingness to use

Abstract

Water recycling is increasingly recognized as a critical strategy to maintain sustainable water supplies. Yet public acceptance of water recycling often lags behind. It is unclear the degree to which individuals are aware of the role of disgust in their decisions about recycled water, how important anticipated disgust is to willingness to use when controlling for other factors, and what the most effective method of presenting information about water recycling would be to decrease disgust reactions and increase willingness to use. We used a two‐pronged approach, combining a survey with open‐ended and psychometric measures with an experimental manipulation, in a U.S., web‐based sample (N = 428). Only 2% of participants self‐identified disgust as important to their decisions about recycled water. When measured directly using a Likert scale, however, anticipated disgust was the strongest predictor of willingness to use recycled water when controlling for individual differences that have been shown to impact willingness to use, including a subscale of individual pathogen disgust sensitivity. Finally, participants were exposed to an educational brochure about water reuse framed either affectively or cognitively or were shown a simple, neutral definition. Exposure to either the affectively or cognitively framed brochures lowered anticipated disgust, but did not significantly affect willingness to use recycled water compared to the neutral condition.

Does food processing mitigate consumers’ concerns about crops grown with recycled water?

“…These findings suggest that processing can mitigate some of the concern associated with recycled water found in previous studies. Consumers' lack of acceptance of fresh foods irrigated with recycled water may be related to aversion (Po et al, 2003;Wester et al, 2016;Kecinski et al, 2016Ellis et al, 2018a and/or its actual and perceived risks as discussed previously.…”

Research on the Influencing Mechanism of Traditional Cultural Values on Citizens’ Behavior Regarding the Reuse of Recycled Water

“…Among them, Gibson & Burton's study has found that the use purpose of reclaimed water and exposure extent to the human are important factors that affect public willingness to accept reclaimed water reuse [5]. People's nauseous reaction to reclaimed water is the so-called "yuck factor", which has also been found as an important indicator of the willingness of people to accept reclaimed water [6][7][8]. There are also other scholars devoted to discovering the differences at the individual level and predicting the reusability of reclaimed water.…”

Communications on Technological Innovations: Potable Water Reuse

“…The importance of the media and of communication regarding potable reused water has been discussed earlier, as well as the responses of populations to media messages [9][10][11][12][13][14]63,[114][115][116][117], and societal views on alternative sources of water [12,[117][118][119][120][121]. Here we discuss the views of the media, policymakers and water utility managers on the technology to produce potable reused water.…”