Xi Luo

Reducing consumer food waste plays an important role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Considering the large number of colleges in China, with the largest enrollment in the world, it is especially important to address the issue of food waste among college students. However, the mechanisms underlying the effects that the college canteen catering modes have on the food-saving behavior of college students remain unclear. To fill this gap, an integrated theoretical framework model was constructed from the perspective of “psychological factors–behavioral intention–external environment–actual behavior” based on the theory of planned behavior, the norm activation model, and the attitude–context–behavior theory. Then, 422 valid questionnaires were empirically analyzed by structural equation modeling and hierarchical regression. The main conclusions of this study are as follows: (1) Food-saving intention and herd mentality are the major drivers of college students’ food-saving behavior. Personal norms, attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavior control, and health risk perception are influencing factors on food-saving intention, among which personal norms have the greatest effect. (2) The standard-quantity catering mode has an inhibitory moderating effect, while the large-/small-portion-size and buffet catering modes have promoting moderating effects in the transformation of food-saving intention into actual behavior. Notably, the moderating effects of the buffet catering mode are more pronounced than those of the large-/small-portion-size catering mode. (3) The standard-quantity catering mode has a promoting moderating effect, while the large-/small-portion-size and buffet catering modes have inhibitory moderating effects in the path of the negative impact of herd mentality on food-saving behavior. These conclusions can help colleges recommend strategies to avoid food waste on their campuses from the perspectives of both the individual student and the food provider.

As one of the means to promote college students’ energy-saving intention, knowledge education has received significant attention. However, the effects of different types of knowledge need to be explored in depth. Knowledge was classified from two dimensions in this paper: direct/specific and instrumental/emancipatory. Then, an eye-tracking experiment was used to explore the effects of different types of knowledge. Experimental groups were divided according to the types of knowledge. After knowledge education, the change degree of energy-saving intention and activation degree of reference points were recorded. Then, correlation and difference tests were used to analyze the data. The results show the following: First, based on the dimension of emancipatory and instrumental, adding the dimension of directional and specific is conducive to distinguishing the impact of knowledge on energy-saving intention. Second, the specific-instrumental knowledge leads to a positive intention the most obviously, while the specific-emancipatory the least. Thirdly, the activation degree of positive and negative reference points can be used to reflect the improvement of energy-saving intention.