Switching to Green Lifestyles: Behavior Change of Ant Forest Users.

Zhaojun Yang,Xiangchun Kong,Yali Zhang,Jun Sun

doi:10.3390/ijerph15091819

Abstract

Ant Forest is an emerging mobile application platform that engages people in environment-friendly behavior with fragmented time and helps them cultivate ecological awareness and habit. Users grow virtual trees on the platform with the energy saved from daily low-carbon activities, and Ant Forest plants real saplings in desertified areas when the “trees” become big enough. Facilitating the public’s participation in such green welfare, Ant Forest is a new-generation persuasive system with functions like social media and gamification. In addition to perceived persuasiveness in the existing literature, this study includes sense of achievement and perceived entertainment as extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, respectively, to explain people’s continuous use of such a system and consequent behavior change. The results of a survey suggest that primary task support, perceived credibility, and perceived social support associated with Ant Forest positively affect the user’s continuance intention through the mediation of perceived persuasiveness, sense of achievement, and perceiving entertaining. Furthermore, perceived persuasiveness and continuance intention lead to ultimate behavior change. The findings suggest the importance of both persuasive and motivational considerations in the implementation of new-generation persuasive systems to make them effective in the long run.

Highlights

The rapid economic development of human societies has led to excessive consumption of natural resources and deterioration of the ecological environment from production and living activities
The Harman single-factor test found that the proportion of the first principal component in the unrotated factor matrix was 42.96%. As it was below 50%, no serious common method bias was detected
The results further dismissed the threat of Common method bias (CMB) to statistical conclusion validity

Summary

Introduction

The rapid economic development of human societies has led to excessive consumption of natural resources and deterioration of the ecological environment from production and living activities. Humanity faces increasingly severe environmental problems, such as global warming, deforestation, and land desertification. To address these worldwide issues, the international community is advocating “green economy”, “low-carbon economy”, and “green and low-carbon development”. Each individual’s green and low-carbon behavior contributes a little bit to environment protection, but the aggregate of such small efforts is significant. Its Internet+ initiative creates opportunities for people to participate in public welfare through new mobile application platforms. Based on its Alipay platform, Ant Financial launched Ant Forest in 2016, which is a mobile application for users to manage personal carbon accounts. Featuring social interaction and game entertainment, Ant Forest promotes green welfare by encouraging individual low-carbon behavior for public benefits

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion