Can Sustainability Cues Make Us Worse People?

Abstract

In recent years, due to rising concerns with environmental issues, sustainability-related design or communication features have become ubiquitous. Many of these features are devoid of statements about the sustainability credentials of specific products or firms, and can be called sustainability cues in that they are contextual stimuli that could prompt sustainability-related thoughts and emotions in people’s minds. We find that these features, innocuous or well-intentioned as they might seem, negatively affect people’s moral behavior. Specifically, we theorize and find empirical evidence that the presence of these sustainability cues during purchase decisions has a negative influence on subsequent prosocial behavior – an effect we label as “pseudo-licensing” for its parallels to licensing effects on prosocial behavior due to prior moral actions. We empirically examine this effect in the three online experimental studies. The findings reveal that participants who make purchase decisions over products without explicit claims about sustainability benefits subsequently donate less to a charity, if features such as text in green or sustainability-related textual messages accompany the purchase decision. We also find that this negative effect is mitigated when the donation target is an environmental charity or when the participants are exposed to the sustainability cues without making purchase decisions.