Neuromarketing as a tool for environmental conditioning and sustainable consumption

Abstract

The impact of human factors on climate change is unequivocal. While consumers are increasingly becoming aware of their environmental footprint, this is not sufficient: contextual factors such as pricing, convenience, and packaging play a role in consumers’ decision-making. This has created a gap between consumers’ attitudes and behavior, which calls for intervention of behavioral sciences to change consumer behavior and consequently combat the climate crisis effectively. Consumer neuroscience methodology has been proposed as a potential tool to untangle the neural and psychological origins of consumers’ behavior since subjective reports may be biased by social desirability and therefore are not a reliable measure of pro-environmental behavior. Prior studies have shown that conditioning the consumer with information on the environmental impact of products can influence their buying behavior and brain activity. This paper provides an extended exploration of past works on consumer neuroscience, environmental behavior, and conditioning techniques. We aim to unite the current theories and common practices and uncover future research directions in an effort to develop a neuroscientifically supported conditioning intervention that could promote pro-environmental behavior in consumers.