How do you design a city where the plant-based choice wins on its own merits?
Tel Aviv offers a striking alternative, and the lesson is about framing, not virtue. The city is widely called the vegan capital of the world, with one of the highest concentrations of plant-based restaurants anywhere and over four hundred vegan and vegan-friendly kitchens. But it is not a climate city. It is a food city. People eat plant-based there because it is tastier, cheaper and more social, not because they were lectured about their carbon footprint. The environment makes the plant-based choice the most attractive choice. And that, it turns out, is the only thing that reliably works.
The message that asks for sacrifice
The conventional response to the gap between climate awareness and climate behaviour is to communicate harder and more morally. More climate communication. Moral appeals to fly less. Awareness campaigns about your personal carbon footprint. The logic assumes people fail to act because they do not understand or do not care enough, and that a stronger moral message will move them.
But the standard climate message asks for sacrifice, and sacrifice triggers resistance. Stop flying, eat less meat, consume less, every one of these is framed as giving something up, as a loss. And people resist losses almost reflexively, not because they reject the climate cause, but because being told to sacrifice something you enjoy provokes a defensive reaction. The more the message insists on the sacrifice, the more the resistance hardens. No volume of moral climate communication overcomes this, because the framing itself, sacrifice, is what generates the pushback.
Tel Aviv flips the framing entirely. The plant-based choice there is not presented as a sacrifice for the planet; it is simply the most attractive option on its own terms, tastier, cheaper, more social. People eat plant-based not despite a loss but because of a gain: the food is genuinely better, the experience genuinely more enjoyable. The environment, full of excellent, appealing, affordable plant-based options, makes the sustainable choice the desirable choice, with no moral appeal and no demand for sacrifice anywhere in sight. The behaviour follows the better deal, not the guilt.
Why this is design, not sacrifice
You could read Tel Aviv as a happy coincidence of food culture and sustainability. But the behavioural lesson is deliberate and general: it is about how the choice is framed and offered.
Tel Aviv does not motivate people to eat plant-based by appealing to their environmental conscience. There is no campaign about the climate cost of meat doing the work. The behaviour comes from the environment making the plant-based option the most attractive one, so people choose it for entirely self-interested reasons, taste, cost, sociability, and the sustainability comes along for free. People are not persuaded to sacrifice; they are offered a better deal, and they take it. The behaviour is not driven by moral motivation. It is driven by an environment that makes the sustainable choice the genuinely preferable one.
That is the difference between design and motivation, and on climate it may be the whole game. Motivation, in the form of moral appeals, asks people to sacrifice for a distant cause, which triggers resistance and changes little. Design changes the environment so the sustainable choice is the attractive choice, removing the sacrifice and with it the resistance. You cannot reliably guilt people into giving up things they enjoy. You can build an environment where the sustainable option is the one they would choose anyway, and let the behaviour follow.
The resistance to climate behaviour was never only about people not caring. It was about a message that framed the sustainable choice as a sacrifice rather than a gain.
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The principle: reactance and gain framing
The research underneath this is well established, and naming it turns Tel Aviv's food scene into a usable principle.[1]
Two ideas combine. The first is reactance theory, developed by the psychologist Jack Brehm, which holds that when people feel their freedom is being threatened, when they are told to give something up, they experience a motivational push to resist and reassert that freedom. A message demanding sacrifice is almost designed to trigger reactance: it threatens the freedom to fly, to eat what you like, to consume, and the predictable response is resistance. The second idea is gain framing: the same choice presented as a benefit rather than a loss meets far less resistance and produces more behaviour change. Frame the plant-based meal as a delicious, affordable, sociable gain rather than a climate-driven sacrifice, and the reactance never fires.
Tel Aviv is gain framing built into an entire environment. The plant-based choice is offered not as a loss for the planet but as a genuine gain for the person, better food, lower cost, a more sociable experience, so there is no threatened freedom for reactance to defend, and no sacrifice to resist. This is why the environment outperforms the moral campaign so completely. The campaign frames sustainability as a sacrifice and triggers reactance; the environment frames it as a better deal and dissolves the resistance. Offer people a gain rather than demanding a sacrifice, and the behaviour they were resisting becomes the behaviour they choose.
The resistance was never only about indifference to the climate. It was about a message that triggered reactance by demanding sacrifice, where a better deal would have dissolved it.
There is a lesson here that the climate movement, and indeed anyone trying to change a stubborn behaviour at scale, has been slow to absorb. The dominant strategy for decades has been to make the moral case harder and louder, on the assumption that if people only understood the stakes clearly enough, they would change. Reactance theory predicts almost the opposite: the harder the moral demand presses on people's freedom to live as they like, the more some of them will dig in, not out of wickedness but out of the basic human impulse to defend a threatened freedom. Tel Aviv did not win its residents over by sharpening the argument. It made the desired behaviour the genuinely better option and let self-interest do what moral pressure could not. The uncomfortable but liberating implication is that you often achieve more by making the good choice attractive than by making the case for it unanswerable. People do not need to be argued into a better deal. They just need to be offered one.
What you can design this week
You do not need a whole food culture to apply this. The principle, dissolve reactance with gain framing, works wherever you want people to adopt a behaviour they currently resist.
Frame the choice as a gain, not a sacrifice. A message that asks people to give something up triggers resistance. The same behaviour presented as a genuine benefit, tastier, cheaper, better, meets far less. Ask whether you are demanding a sacrifice or offering a gain.
Make the desired option genuinely more attractive. Tel Aviv works because the plant-based food is actually better, not because people were told to eat it. The most reliable way to get a behaviour adopted is to make the desired option the one people would choose for their own reasons.
Avoid threatening people's freedom. Reactance fires when people feel told what to do. Designing choices that feel freely made, where the better option is simply available and appealing, sidesteps the resistance that instructions provoke.
Stop relying on moral appeals to override self-interest. This is the deeper shift. Asking people to sacrifice for a distant cause works poorly and breeds resistance. Aligning the sustainable choice with their immediate self-interest, taste, cost, enjoyment, works far better, because then there is nothing to resist.
The thread is the one that runs through everything we do at SUE. You rarely change behaviour by demanding sacrifice for a cause. You change it by designing an environment where the better choice is also the more attractive one. Tel Aviv did not guilt its residents into eating less meat. It made the plant-based choice the genuinely better deal, and let the behaviour follow.
If you want to learn how to dissolve resistance with gain framing and design choices people adopt for their own reasons, that is exactly the kind of work our Behavioural Design training is built around.
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