Giving Compass' Take:

• Pacific Standard reports on recent research that shows how peer pressure can induce positive behavior, such as quitting smoking and choosing healthier food options.

• The trick is to show other people's success and is a form of conformity — people adapting to how they envision the future. But is it sustainable? How can such psychological influence be scaled for social and environmental change?

• Here's how making outstanding meat substitutes can help end factory farming.

Psychologists have found a simple trick to reduce meat consumption in restaurants. Tell a customer that other people are increasingly choosing the menu's meatless options, and the customer becomes more likely to order a vegetarian meal.

It's a simple but effective intervention that relies on peer pressure and social influence to convince people to rethink their longstanding habits, says Gregg Sparkman, a Ph.D. student in psychology at Stanford University who led the experiment. Essentially, Sparkman's findings show that you can change a person's behavior by highlighting other people's success in changing their behaviors. In another forthcoming study, currently under peer review, Sparkman argues that the same method could be used to help people stop smoking, quit sugary drinks, and even to identify as feminist.

"When people see others changing, they envision that, in the future, norms might be even more different — that the trend is probably going to continue," Sparkman says. For the experiment, he persuaded restaurant-goers to imagine a world where people eat less meat, nudging them to change their own habits. "They're reacting to their anticipated view of the world. We call that 'pre-conformity': essentially, people conforming to how they envision the future will be."

Read the full article about peer pressure and meat consumption by Sophie Yeo at Pacific Standard.