How to Regain Green Consumer Trust after Greenwashing: Experimental Evidence from China

Abstract

Greenwashing leads to consumer skepticism of all green products as well as doubts about company claims regarding sustainability. However, the understanding of how to regain green consumer trust after greenwashing is rather limited. The authors fill this gap by exploring the psychological process of green consumers following intervention strategies designed to reduce greenwashing. We collect and interpret quantitative data from two psychological experiments, the first experiment identified two types of intervention strategies that serve to counter the negative impact of greenwashing and based on our findings from the first studies, we proposed and tested the moderating effect of two factors—implicit beliefs of consumers and companies who implement intervention strategies after greenwashing. The results indicate that distrust regulation (quantifying a product’s green attributes) and trustworthiness demonstration (visualizing environmental behaviors) are effective intervention strategies that can enable consumers to re-evaluate the cost-benefit of green products, and which may serve as critical psychological factors for green consumers and contribute to the degree of trust. Validation and comparative study of the derived results show that distrust regulation, followed by trustworthiness demonstration, has the best effect on increasing green trust after intervention. If the sequence is reversed, the effect of the intervention strategy is worse than if only one strategy had been applied. The implicit beliefs of green consumers play a moderating role between intervention strategies and reconsideration of the cost-benefit of green products. The behavior of genuinely green companies and the incremental beliefs of consumers can promote the intervention effect after greenwashing. Alternatively, the behavior of greenwashing companies can easily counter these effects. These findings contribute to knowledge about which psychological factors can promote or hinder the effectiveness of an intervention.