The Individual Green-Washing Effect in E-Mobility: Emotional Evaluations of Electric and Gasoline Cars.

Ronja Rundberg,Petra Jansen,Philipp Hofmann,Franziska Anna Schroter

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.594844

Abstract

In this study, the affective explicit and implicit attitudes toward electric and gasoline cars are investigated. One hundred sixty-five participants (103 cisgender women, 62 cisgender men) completed an explicit and implicit affective rating task toward pictures of electric and gasoline cars, measurements of sustainability, future and past behaviors, and mindfulness. The results showed a positive emotional attitude for the electric cars compared with the gasoline cars only for the explicit rating but not for the implicit one. Furthermore, factors that correlated to the attitudes were investigated: explicit ratings in car owners correlated with age, degree, sustainability in general, and the expressed intention to purchase an electric car in the future. Implicit attitudes in car owners correlated with the overall score of mindfulness and the dimension of “non-reactivity.” For the non-car owners, explicit attitudes correlated with the expressed intention to purchase an electric car in the future and the mindfulness dimension of “describing”. In this group, the implicit attitude correlated negatively with the mindfulness intention of acting with awareness. This indicates that several different factors should be considered in the development of promotion campaigns for the advantage of sustainable mobility behavior.

Highlights

One reason for air pollution and climate change is vehicular emission (Sims et al, 2014)
A first study on sustainable transportation behavior has been conducted by Manca et al (2019)
While investigating the effect of argument quality on explicit and implicit attitudes of sustainable transportation, Manca et al (2019) carved out the following picture: if the participants were highly involved in the topic of sustainable transportation, implicit attitudes were more positive in the condition where the arguments came from high source expertise, which is in contrast to the implicit attitudes of participants with low involvement

Summary

Introduction

One reason for air pollution and climate change is vehicular emission (Sims et al, 2014). A first study on sustainable transportation behavior has been conducted by Manca et al (2019) They identified past sustainable behaviors, Green-Washing in E-Mobility attitudes, and emotions as the key determinants of proenvironmental behavior: for the change in travel behavior, habit deactivation is a necessary but not a sufficient condition (Thøgersen and Møller, 2008). The results of their study demonstrated that the fear to receive negative consequences of a potential unsustainable behavior might be the main predictor for the pro-environmental choice in the explicit rating Both implicit and explicit attitudes were not correlated, but both are important to predict the behavioral intention. While the central route demands more time for evaluating the message with the former existing schema, the peripheral route describes an attitude change, which might be less enduring

Methods

Results

Conclusion