Conscientious consumers: a relationship between moral foundations, political orientation and sustainable consumption

Abstract

Encouraging change towards more sustainable ways of living and more sustainable places to live is a complex process. Part of this complexity is to do with understanding the motives and values that drive behavioural change towards sustainable consumption. As an important sub-set of values research, moral foundations have been found to underlie and motivate individuals' attitudes to a broad range of issues and to be strongly reflected in individuals' political orientation. However, there is no literature to date investigating the link between moral foundations and sustainable consumption. Increasingly, marketplace choice has emerged as a form of political participation, through which consumers can exercise their moral and ideological beliefs about sustainability and other issues. This paper addresses the identified gap in the literature and presents an argument that moral foundations underpin individual's political orientation and desire for change and that this is enacted through their individual consumption choices and collective political action in sustainability issues. The paper presents data from a New Zealand study using structural equation modelling to demonstrate the relationship between moral foundations, political orientation, individual sustainable consumption behaviours and wider political involvement in sustainability issues. Our results show that people with individualising moral foundations, who tend to the political left, are more likely to engage in sustainable consumption behaviour and to demonstrate their commitment to change through political action on sustainability issues than people who hold binding moral foundations. This paper extends our understanding of value–behaviour linkages and gaps with regards to sustainable consumption by focussing on the importance of moral values. These insights provide the basis on which more effective communication strategies could be developed that more closely align with and appeal to those with the different moral foundations and political orientations investigated in this study.