Abstract
People consistently act in ways that harm the environment, even when believing their actions are environmentally friendly. A case in point is a biased judgment termed the negative footprint illusion, which arises when people believe that the addition of “eco-friendly” items (e.g., environmentally certified houses) to conventional items (e.g., standard houses), reduces the total carbon footprint of the whole item-set, whereas the carbon footprint is, in fact, increased because eco-friendly items still contribute to the overall carbon footprint. Previous research suggests this illusion is the manifestation of an “averaging-bias.” We present two studies that explore whether people’s susceptibility to the negative footprint illusion is associated with individual differences in: (i) environment-specific reasoning dispositions measured in terms of compensatory green beliefs and environmental concerns; or (ii) general analytic reasoning dispositions measured in terms of actively open-minded thinking, avoidance of impulsivity and reflective reasoning (indexed using the Cognitive Reflection Test; CRT). A negative footprint illusion was demonstrated when participants rated the carbon footprint of conventional buildings combined with eco-friendly buildings (Study 1 and 2) and conventional cars combined with eco-friendly cars (Study 2). However, the illusion was not identified in participants’ ratings of the carbon footprint of apples (Study 1 and 2). In Studies 1 and 2, environment-specific dispositions were found to be unrelated to the negative footprint illusion. Regarding reflective thinking dispositions, reduced susceptibility to the negative footprint illusion was only associated with actively open-minded thinking measured on a 7-item scale (Study 1) and 17-item scale (Study 2). Our findings provide partial support for the existence of a negative footprint illusion and reveal a role of individual variation in reflective reasoning dispositions in accounting for a limited element of differential susceptibility to this illusion.
Highlights
Climate change is one of the most significant challenges facing the modern world (Hansen et al, 2013)
A 2 × 2 repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) test was conducted on the carbon footprint ratings to identify the presence of a negative footprint illusion
Pairwise comparisons with a Bonferroni adjustment revealed the presence of a negative footprint illusion in the case of the buildings item type (p = 0.004), with estimates for the conventional buildings (M = 0.68, SE = 0.02) significantly higher than estimates for the conventional plus eco-friendly buildings (M = 0.64, SE = 0.03)
Summary
Climate change is one of the most significant challenges facing the modern world (Hansen et al, 2013). It has been widely demonstrated that people incorrectly reason that the addition of “eco-friendly” (or “green”) items (e.g., environmentally certified houses) to a set of conventional items (e.g., standard houses) reduces the carbon footprint of the combined set of items (Holmgren et al, 2018a), whereas the carbon footprint of the combined set increases This reasoning bias is termed the negative footprint illusion (Gorissen and Weijters, 2016; Holmgren et al, 2018a,b; Sörqvist et al, 2020). The illusion has been replicated many times, and has been shown to be insensitive to scale type (Gorissen and Weijters, 2016), expertise (Holmgren et al, 2018b), framing (Holmgren et al, 2019), quantity of additional items (i.e., “quantity insensitivity”; see Kim and Schuldt, 2018), experimental design (occurring in both between- and within-participants designs; see Holmgren et al, 2018a), and different stimulus materials such as foods (Gorissen and Weijters, 2016) and buildings (Holmgren et al, 2018a)
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