In contemporary consumer society, meal preparation practices have shifted from traditional home cooking toward more diversified forms that include meal kits. While increasing time constraints and cognitive burdens have elevated efficiency and convenie...
In contemporary consumer society, meal preparation practices have shifted from traditional home cooking toward more diversified forms that include meal kits. While increasing time constraints and cognitive burdens have elevated efficiency and convenience as central values in cooking, meal preparation continues to be perceived as an act imbued with care and moral responsibility, often generating feelings of guilt and psychological tension among consumers. This study interprets this paradoxical consumption phenomenon through the Action-Based Model of Cognitive Dissonance (ABM) and empirically examines whether meal kits function as a dissonance-reduction strategy within the cooking context.To this end, moral identity was specified as a moderating variable, while cooking value incongruence, cognitive dissonance, dissonance-related emotions, dissonance reduction strategies, and cooking behavior were incorporated as the core constructs of the research model. Cooking enjoyment was included as a control variable. Survey data were collected from 800 adult consumers with prior experience using meal kits, and hierarchical regression analyses as well as mediation and moderation analyses were conducted using SPSS 22.0 and PROCESS Macro 4.2.
The results indicate that cooking value incongruence significantly increased cognitive dissonance, which in turn influenced dissonance reduction strategies through dissonance-related emotions. Dissonance reduction strategies exerted a positive effect on cooking behavior, demonstrating that cooking behavior is enacted through selected strategies under conditions of dissonance. Moral identity moderated the relationship between cooking value incongruence and cognitive dissonance, with individuals lower in moral identity experiencing greater cognitive dissonance under equivalent value conflicts. Differences by family size further suggest that cooking-related dissonance is shaped not only at the individual level but also within relational and social contexts.
This study extends the application of the Action-Based Model of Cognitive Dissonance to food consumption and cooking behavior, empirically demonstrating the multidimensional structure of dissonance by distinguishing cognitive dissonance from dissonance-related emotions. Moreover, it validates moral identity as a self-referential moderating factor and quantitatively confirms the structure of culinary antinomies, positioning cooking as a normative practice. Overall, the findings highlight meal kits as a psychological buffering mechanism that alleviates moral conflict in cooking, offering practical implications for product design and communication strategies in the food industry.