Talking green and acting green are two different things: An experimental investigation of the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes and low carbon consumer choice

Abstract

Abstract One major assumption in the climate change debate is that because respondents report positive attitudes to the environment and to low carbon lifestyles they will subsequently engage in environmentally friendly/low carbon behaviors when given the right guidance or information. Many governmental agencies have based their climate change strategy on this basic assumption, despite some anxiety about the value-action gap in psychology more generally. Here we test this assumption. We investigated the relationship between explicit and implicit attitudes to carbon footprint, and both self-reports of environmental behavior and low carbon behavioral choices. We found that self-reported attitudes to carbon footprint were significantly associated only with self-reported environmental and self-reported low-carbon behaviors. They were not significantly associated with the choice of low carbon alternatives in a simulated shopping task. Given that the vast majority of studies on attitudes and behavior in the environmental domain use self-report measures of behavior, this may mean that we are generating research findings that could be making policy makers overly complacent about our readiness for actual behavior change. Implicit attitudes were not significantly associated with either measure in terms of group comparisons, but those with a strong positive implicit attitude towards low carbon did choose more low carbon items, but only under time pressure. The opposite trend was found for explicit attitudes – this increased only when participants were not under time pressure. These results suggest that Kahneman’s hypothesis about contrasting systems of human cognition might be highly relevant to the domain of climate change and behavioral adaptation.