R&D Unplugged #14 - discover our research

12 June 2025 - 11:00 - 12:00 CET

Join us for R&D Unplugged #14 with Carina Castagna

Why we fear ugly fruit - and how to unlearn it

Why do we reject fruit and vegetables simply because they look imperfect?This talk explores the invisible biases in our brains that lead to food waste, and how learning can help change them.
Drawing on six psychological experiments and a neuroscientific study using eye-tracking, Carina will explain how aesthetic imperfections trigger risk aversion in the most primitive regions of the brain, leading to the unnecessary discarding of edible products.

But there's a powerful idea: when people are encouraged to think abstractly, this wasteful bias decreases significantly.We'll explore what this means for education, behavior change and sustainability transitions. The talk has practical implications for teaching sustainability and reframing how young people and adults learn to care about food and waste

open to all!

→ Watch the video

→ Listen to the podcast

More about the speaker

Presentation of the speaker :Carina Castagna explores our brain's influence on mental health, sustainability and the way we learn.
She is a behavioral scientist at the Learning Planet Institute, where her work bridges psychology, education and environmental responsibility to uncover the hidden drivers of how we think, feel and act.She holds a PhD in Behavioral Sciences from NOVA IMS (Portugal) and the City University of New York (CUNY)..In 2023, his research on scarcity mentalities and psychological well-being earned him the Society for Consumer Psychology's Best Dissertation Award. His work has been published in leading academic journals and presented at international conferences in Europe and North America.

R&D Unplugged is organized by’Learning Transitions research unit. For more details on the R&D Unplugged format, as well as information on past and upcoming events, please visit our website.

Address:

Learning Planet Institute
8bis rue Charles V
75004 Paris

Metro access :

Sully-Morland (Line 7)
Saint-Paul (Line 1)
Bastille (lines 5 and 8)