Cultivating pro-environmental choices and behaviors is an important concern for tourism research and practice. Informed by recent developments in psychological research on embodied cognition and the moral effects of physical cleansing, we elicit novel insights about the causal relationship between the embodied experience of physical cleansing and pro-environmental travel choices. Across four experiments, we show that when one’s moral self-regard is heightened by the virtue of physical cleansing, it can motivate consumers to engage in pro-environmental travel choices. Importantly, we show that such an effect occurs because, after physical cleansing, consumers experience more expected guilt for not choosing a morally preferred environmentally friendly travel option within the evoked set of travel alternatives. Our study offers a novel way to understand how consumers can be “nudged” to choose pro-environmental travel options beyond fostering positive attitudes toward sustainability per se. Important implications for tourism research and practice are discussed.
Previous research has established that both liberals and conservatives tend to reject charity appeals that are incongruent with their political ideologies. We posit that a brief mindfulness intervention can improve consumers' evaluations of charity appeals whose values appear incongruent with their political ideology. In four studies, we show that a brief mindfulness meditation increases evaluations of charity appeals among consumers with incongruent political ideologies. The effect is mediated by openness to experience and disappears when consumers are under a high cognitive load. The findings offer implications for how to increase generosity to charities on both sides of the political divide.
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