Strength from the Past: How Nostalgia and Self-Construal Affect Consumers’ Willingness to Continue Participating in Sustainable Behaviors

Tao Le

doi:10.4236/ajibm.2020.102029

Abstract

Solving environmental problems is important for the sustainable development of human beings. And consumers play a key role in solving environmental problems. However, there are many challenges in promoting consumers’ participation in sustainable behaviors, such as “green fatigue”, ego-others trade-off, and “long-term perspective”. Starting from how to enable consumers to overcome challenges and participate more in sustainable behaviors, this research focused on the impact of cognition and emotion on sustainable consumption behaviors. More specifically, this research mainly explored how arousing consumers’ nostalgia will affect their continuous participation in sustainable consumption behaviors. Through three studies, current research found that nostalgia affects consumers’ willingness to participate in sustainable consumption behaviors, while nostalgia type and self-construal interact to influence consumers’ willingness to participate in sustainable consumption behavior, and collective efficacy and personal efficacy play a mediation role respectively.

Highlights

Environmental issues are related to human sustainable development
Current research found that nostalgia affects consumers’ willingness to participate in sustainable consumption behaviors, while nostalgia type and self-construal interact to influence consumers’ willingness to participate in sustainable consumption behavior, and collective efficacy and personal efficacy play a mediation role respectively
This experiment is mainly used to test whether the self-construal form of consumers and nostalgia have a joint effect on consumers’ willingness of continuous participation in sustainable consumption behavior, that is, to verify hypothesis 2

Summary

Introduction

Environmental issues are related to human sustainable development. The demand of natural resources has grown rapidly, and these resources have been overexploited; on the other hand, environmental pollution caused by human activities has become increasingly serious. Environmental problems are largely caused by human behavior, and especially depend on human sustainable behavior decisions. Participation in sustainable consumption behaviors first requires overcoming the self-other trade-off (White et al, 2019). Research has found that as climate change and other issues are serious and vague, they can have large-scale consequences that make individual actions seem trivial. Negative emotions will be aroused due to information overload and lack of confidence in meaningful changes (Strother & Fazal, 2011), and these negative emotions may demotivate consumers to persist

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Conclusion