Combatting medical plastic waste through visual elicitation: Insights from healthcare professionals

Abstract In spite of the focus on improving treatment methods and determining the economic and environmental impacts of medical waste management, little research has been conducted to understand consumer perceptions of medical waste reduction. In healthcare setting, our research seeks to address this urgent need by investigating how visual cues can be used to elicit healthcare professionals' willingness to reduce medical plastics. By employing the vignette-based experimental method, we collected data from 1,139 healthcare professionals to examine how visual characteristics (i.e., visual clutter, colorfulness, the presence of human face, the presence of animal) in images of medical plastic pollution were used to arouse moral shock and emotional energy in healthcare professionals. The results of our study suggest that visual displays should be cluttered, colorful, and characterized by human presence. By displaying these visuals in an image of anti-plastic pollution, healthcare professionals are most likely to express their sadness, rage, and despair, and enhance their intention to refuse medical plastics to the fullest extent. By contrast to the previous study, we found that healthcare professionals’ moral shock and willingness to refuse medical plastics were not significantly impacted by the presence of animals on the images.