Failure to translate intentions into actual behaviour is known in many areas of human action. The intention to consume more sustainable is no exception and often fails to be translated into behaviour. Behavioural research emphasized the use of nudges as one of the remedies to ensure that most of the people's daily choices on what to buy or what to eat end up being in their best interest. The behavioural economics literature usually focusses on interventions supporting automatic and unconscious processes, mostly being the result of cognitive shortcuts produced by System 1 (e.g., by setting better default options or making existing contexts more intuitive and easy to handle). However, this begs the question, what consumers themselves can do to ensure a consumption behaviour that is more in line with their pro-environmental intentions? This article explores a possible 'self-nudging' strategy of consumers signing up for an organic box scheme subscription, whereby they change a large number of small daily choices to a larger decision on exclusively getting organic groceries delivered to their doorstep. It does so based on qualitative indepth interviews with 10 customers of such an organic box scheme. The analysis reveals that signing up for the subscription scheme indeed means that low-involvement decisions in regular supermarkets are replaced by a high-involvement decision on subscribing to an organic box scheme. In this context of the organic box scheme, the self-nudging phenomenon is in fact the active choice of consumers to set their default consumption option to 'organic' in the long run.
K E Y W O R D Sconsumer decision making, intention-behaviour gap, organic, qualitative, self-nudging, sustainable food choice
The current sustainability labeling landscape has been accused of creating unnecessary consumer confusion due to too much, too complex, too similar, and too ambiguous information. Meta‐sustainability labeling is proposed as a solution. We provide the first evidence on the added value of this instrument based on a survey in the USA (N = 518) and Germany (N = 520). Participants were randomly allocated to one of four different conditions: (1) traditional labeling, (2) new, common label design, (3) traditional labeling plus meta label, and (4) new, common label design plus meta label. The study confirms the preference for sustainability‐labeled products in both countries. In the USA, the new, common label design outperforms traditional labeling. Adding a meta label reduced the effect. In Germany, both the common labeling design and the meta label improved the effectiveness of sustainability labeling for some consumer segments. The new designs are built on the branding of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, which makes them practically relevant for global implementation.
Pro-environmental behavior experts (PEBEXs) encounter tensions associated with sustainable consumption, just like other individuals. What distinguishes them is their high level of knowledge, motivation, and reflection on climate change topics, as intended by many downstream policy interventions targeting individual consumption behavior. Based on 31 problem-centered interviews with PEBEXs, we found two general coping strategies: contributing to maximizing sustainable consumption and accommodating to the minimization of perceived tension. These coping strategies offer a promising source of information for individuals in general on how to drive personal consumption behavior in more sustainable directions and how to deal with accompanying barriers and tensions. Because coping strategies can be trained, the introduced strategies can support the design of interventions targeting individual consumption decisions. Furthermore, we emphasize the importance of accompanying upstream interventions, such as structural changes, to support individual behavior changes.
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