Influencing green behaviour through environmental goal priming: The mediating role of automatic evaluation

Abstract

Understanding how pro-environmental messages may influence behaviour is key to promoting sustainable consumer choice. Research suggests that people automatically evaluate objects as a function of their instrumentality to satisfying active goals. We hypothesized that priming an environmental-protection goal through exposure to a pro-environmental message would produce more positive automatic evaluations and lead people to make the pro-environmental choice of selecting loose rather than packaged products in a hypothetical choice task. As predicted, those primed with an environmental-protection goal automatically evaluated loose products more positively and selected more loose consumer products than a control group. Increased implicit positivity towards loose products mediated the observed behaviour change. Crucially, the effect of environmental goal priming on choices or implicit attitudes towards packaging was not contingent on existing environmental attitudes. Our findings suggest that pro-environmental messages could induce more environmentally friendly consumer choice by leading people to evaluate readily available goal-relevant stimuli positively.