The urgency of climate change mitigation calls for a profound shift in personal behavior. This paper investigates psycho-social correlates of extra mitigation behavior in response to climate change, while also testing for potential (unobserved) heterogeneity in European citizens' decision-making. A person's extra mitigation behavior in response to climate change is conceptualized—and differentiated from common mitigation behavior—as some people's broader and greater levels of behavioral engagement (compared to others) across specific self-reported mitigation actions and behavioral domains. Regression analyses highlight the importance of environmental psychographics (i.e., attitudes, motivations, and knowledge about climate change) and socio-demographics (especially country-level variables) in understanding extra mitigation behavior. By looking at the data through the lens of segmentation, significant heterogeneity is uncovered in the associations of attitudes and knowledge about climate change—but not in motivational or socio-demographic links—with extra mitigation behavior in response to climate change, across two groups of environmentally active respondents. The study has implications for promoting more ambitious behavioral responses to climate change, both at the individual level and across countries.
Consumers in Western markets are often called against foreign‐made products and their country‐of‐origin (COO), particularly against controversial COOs and products. As a result, Asian emerging countries and their manufacturing industries (e.g., apparel, toys, or chemicals) have become major targets of anti‐consumption in the West, with criticism rooted in political‐economic, social, and/or environmental issues. In addition, Western consumers' ethnocentric tendencies are often reinforced by campaigning for domestic product/service alternatives. This backdrop raises questions about the degree of consumers' macro COO knowledge and ethnocentrism, and of their importance as levers of consumer concern about (i.e., risk perceptions) and anti‐consumption of foreign products from a controversial COO. This article thus sheds light on the extent to which COO knowledge (whether macro or based on usage experience), along with consumer ethnocentrism, can be considered antecedents of two risk perception types and, in turn, of country‐driven anti‐consumption (CDAC)—in the context of this work, Spanish consumers' reluctance to buy and (non‐)ownership of Chinese apparel products. The findings reveal that consumer ethnocentrism heightens both psycho‐social and performance risk perceptions and contributes to reluctance to buy. Macro COO knowledge affects CDAC only indirectly through performance risk perceptions. By contrast, usage experience attenuates both performance and psycho‐social risk perceptions and directly affects foreign product ownership. Risk perceptions predict and mediate most of the effects of COO knowledge, consumer ethnocentrism, and usage experience on CDAC outcomes. Implications for research, policy, and practice are also discussed.
This paper delves into the role of social and environmental country images—along with other relevant product-country influencing factors—in consumers’ reluctance to buy foreign products. Two integrative research models are proposed and tested on Spanish consumers’ reluctance to buy Chinese apparel products. In doing so, the authors draw on and seek to advance theory and knowledge on country-of-origin (COO) effects and anti-consumption. The findings reveal the importance of social and environmental, as well as political-economic issues, in measuring (China’s) foreign country image. Yet, a disaggregated analysis discovered differential effects of the three country image factors examined, that is, as factors indirectly influencing reluctance to buy. The findings are also supportive of the importance of three additional COO influence mechanisms—cognitive (foreign product judgments), affective (country animosity) and normative influences (consumer ethnocentrism)—for consumers’ reluctance to buy foreign products. Implications of the study for research, policy, and practice are discussed.
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