Abstract
Recent years have seen a marked increase in carbon emissions despite pledges made by the international community at the Paris Accord in 2015 to reduce fossil fuel production and consumption. Rebound effects could contribute to this phenomenon as, in which attempts to curb carbon emissions might have inadvertently led to an upswing in fossil fuel usage. The present study hypothesizes that rebound effects are driven by a misapplication of compensatory balancing heuristics, with the unintended outcome of producing inaccurate estimates of the environmental impact of “green” or environmentally friendly labelled products or behaviors. The present study therefore aims to investigate the relationship between participants’ degree of compensatory thinking (e.g., “Recycling compensates for driving a car”) and their susceptibility to the Negative Footprint Illusion, a widely replicated phenomenon demonstrating that the presence of “green” products biases carbon footprint estimations. One hundred and twelve participants were asked to complete a 15-item Compensatory Green Beliefs scale and to estimate the total carbon footprint of a set of 15 conventional houses, followed by a set that included 15 “green” houses in addition to 15 conventional houses. Results indicated that participants, on average, believed that the “green” houses were carbon neutral, and that susceptibility to the Negative Footprint Illusion was predicted by performance on the Compensatory Green Beliefs scale. This is the first study confirming that individual differences in cognitive processes (i.e., Compensatory Green Beliefs) are indeed related to inaccurate estimates of “green” products, providing a foundation for further investigation of the influence of “green” and compensatory beliefs on carbon footprint estimates.
Highlights
Recent years have seen urgent calls from the international scientific community for anthropogenic carbon emissions to be drastically reduced so as to avert or mitigate a number of environmental threats [1]
The carbon footprint estimates for the ‘green addition condition’ (M = 5.88, SD = 1.87, 95% confidence interval [5.5:6.2]) did not differ from the estimates for the ‘control condition’ (M = 6.11, SD = 1.38, 95% confidence interval [5.9:6.4])
These results suggest that the participants did not judge the combined set of 30 conventional and green houses as having a significantly greater carbon footprint than the set of 15 conventional houses, as was predicted
Summary
Recent years have seen urgent calls from the international scientific community for anthropogenic carbon emissions to be drastically reduced so as to avert or mitigate a number of environmental threats (e.g., global temperature increases, extinctions, warming and acidifying oceans, sea level rise, extreme weather events) [1]. The 2015 Paris Accord seemed to hail a significant international political response accompanied by strong social will to enact changes, represented by the rise of climate movements (e.g., 350.org) [2] and strikes (e.g., Fridays for Future) [3]. Many structural barriers to sustainable behavior exist such as economic reliance on comparatively cheap fossil fuels, psychological and cognitive barriers have been identified as partly responsible for inaction on anthropogenic climate change, and are increasingly being recognized as an important focus of investigation [8,9,10,11]
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