Abstract
The increasing demand for environmental protection has given rise to burgeoning research on green consumption. The present research adds to this expanding literature by investigating a novel predictor of consumer green consumption: awe. As a self-transcendent emotion, awe arises when people encounter perceptually vast stimuli that overwhelm their existing knowledge and mental structures, and, meanwhile, this also elicits a need for accommodation. This research proposes and demonstrates that, compared with happiness and a neutral affective state, experience of awe promotes green consumption via an enhanced psychological ownership of nature. Moreover, this research identifies a condition by showing that, while awe promotes green consumption when interdependent self-construal is activated, this effect diminishes when independent self-construal is activated.
Highlights
Environmental degradation and global warming have caused adverse health, economic, environmental, and social impacts on a national level as well as on a global scale
Post hoc analysis revealed that participants in the awe condition (Mawe = 5.47, SD = 0.68) were more likely to engage in green purchase behavior than those in the happiness (Mhappiness = 4.92, SD = 0.68) and neutral conditions (Mneutral = 4.76, SD = 0.60; awe vs. happiness: 95% confidence interval (CI) for mean difference [0.18, 0.93], p = 0.002; awe vs. neutral: 95% CI for mean difference [0.33, 1.10], p = 0.000)
Experiment 2 was first conducted to examine whether the causal relationship between awe and green purchase behavior was mediated by psychological ownership
Summary
Environmental degradation and global warming have caused adverse health, economic, environmental, and social impacts on a national level as well as on a global scale. A lot of research has been done from diverse perspectives in the field of sustainability, all pointing to the importance of green consumption (Chan, 2001; Jorgenson, 2003; Lee, 2008). One key reason is that the majority of green consumption research has been conducted from a constraint perspective, applying an analytical framework of anthropocentric development (Thompson and Barton, 1994; Cheung et al, 2014; Shaw et al, 2016) but ignoring unique characteristics of green consumption and people’s desire for autonomous choice (Moeller et al, 2011; Karmarkar and Bollinger, 2015; Kouchaki et al, 2018).
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