Predicting sustainable consumption behavior: knowledge-based, value-based, emotional and rational influences on mobile phone, food and fashion consumption

ABSTRACT

Increasing sustainable consumption practices of individuals constitutes a crucial pillar of the global sustainable development strategy. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to examine psychological influences from different research streams and their incremental predictive value for sustainable consumption. In two studies, knowledge-based, value-based, emotional and rational factors were considered to predict sustainable consumption behavior of mobile phones, food and fashion.

Survey data were obtained from an online panel (Study 1: N = 101, Study 2: N = 304). Multiple regression results showed that value-based, emotional and rational factors contributed significantly to the prediction of sustainable consumption in both studies and all product groups. Problem awareness was a significant predictor only for food consumption.

To improve the explained variance and detect different patterns of prediction, influencing factors were included into the prediction in varying order. Hierarchical regression results showed that a joint consideration of factors from different theoretical streams improved the prediction and that product-specific patterns emerged.

The findings support the need to jointly consider different influencing factors for the prediction of sustainable consumption. Understanding the drivers and obstacles of sustainable consumption constitutes the basis for educational measures or marketing interventions. The present study contributes to gaining product-specific knowledge which is pivotal for tailoring such measures to different consumption areas.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable mobile phone consumption
• sustainable food consumption
• sustainable fashion consumption
• theory of planned behavior
• value-belief-norm theory
• self-conscious emotions
• problem awareness

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework under the DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/HVJ9T at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/HVJ9T.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Department of Business Psychology, Aalen University of Applied Sciences

2. Sustainable consumption is conceptualized as a way to consume which ensures comparable or better living conditions for current and future generations. This entails carefully handling and protecting natural, social and economic resources.

3. Self-conscious emotions require a representation of the self and result from evaluating one’s actions against a set of (internal or external) standards (Vining and Ebreo 2002; Tracy and Robins 2004).

4. Since this survey constitutes a non-interventional study, ethical approval as foreseen by the Declaration of Helsinki was not required.

5. Originally, additional data was collected for a set of 4 value orientations and post materialism. For reasons of model complexity, these were not considered in further analysis. The full dataset can be obtained from a data repository.

6. Data analysis was originally conducted with structural equation modelling (SEM), integrating the four hypotheses. No sufficient fit to the data was obtained. Following MacCallum and Austin (2000), this might be due to the high complexity of the model, making it necessary to estimate a large number of parameters, in combination with a rather small sample size.

7. In study 2, attitude was measured with three additional items. For reasons of comparability between studies, only the overlapping three items were analyzed. Also, additional data was collected for a set of 4 value orientations and post materialism. For reasons of model complexity, these were not considered in further analysis. The full dataset can be obtained from a data repository.

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of the project ‘Sustainable Consumption of Information and Communication Technology in the Digital Society - Dialogue and Transformation through Open Innovation’ and was supported by the Ministry for Science and Culture of Lower Saxony and the Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung) through the ‘Niedersaechsisches Vorab’ grant program (grant number VWZN3037).