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Despite significant interest from consumers, sustainable products often struggle to find success in the marketplace. This failure is frequently attributed to the perception that consumers remain unwilling to sacrifice product attributes such as form, function, or price in order to adopt a product whose environmental impact is less than that of a competing product. This work aims to better understand how knowing a product's environmental impact affects preference for that product's disparate attributes. Three products of various monetary investments and numbers of relevant features were explored through a conjoint analysis experiment that uncovers consumer preference for discrete form, function, and price attributes. In this work, single use spoons, reusable water bottles, and home washing machines were used for analysis. These three products were decomposed into form, function, and price attributes that were varied in discrete levels. After a form-only ratings-based conjoint analysis study was conducted to find high, medium, and low preference form designs for each participant, two separate form–function–price discrete choice studies were conducted for each of the three products. These two discrete choice trials were identical in all aspects except in the second trial participants were provided with calculated environmental impact values for all design configurations; the presented environmental impact information was a dependent variable based on a life cycle analysis calculation using the current product configuration being shown to the participant. Further, adding this information raises the decision to one of a social or moral choice. Results show that when participants are provided with this additional piece of information, their preference for form, function, and price attributes of a product is greatly impacted. In particular, we find that for the products chosen here, the importance of functional attributes increases in the context of environmental impact metrics, while the importance of form decreases and the importance of price decreases modestly. In other words, placing the preference judgment within a social or moral choice context changes decisions about product preferences.

Trying to decide whether to purchase a sustainable product often puts decision makers in a difficult situation, especially if the more sustainable option provides less desirable features or costs a premium. This paper theorizes that adding sustainability as a variable during product choice evaluations create decisions that are moral choice scenarios, where benefit to society is weighed against personal gain. From an engineering design perspective, modeling user preferences in this context can be extremely difficult. While several methods exist to assist researchers in eliciting consumer preferences, the vast majority relies upon conscious input from the potential consumers themselves. More critically, these methods do not afford researchers the ability to understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying what someone may be feeling or thinking while these preference judgments are being made. In this work, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to investigate the neural processes behind multi-attribute product preference judgments. In particular, this work centers on uncovering unique features of sustainable preference judgments: preference judgments that involve products for which the environmental impact is a known quantity. This work builds upon earlier work that investigated how preference judgments are altered in the context of sustainability. A deeper look at participant decision making at the time of judgment is examined using neuroimaging with the goal of providing actionable insights for designers and product developers.