Can Reflective Diary-Writing Increase Sufficiency-Oriented Consumption? A Longitudinal Intervention Addressing the Role of Basic Psychological Needs, Subjective Well-Being, and Time Affluence

Abstract

Sufficiency is a sustainability strategy aiming for (1) a decrease in absolute resource consumption on individual and societal levels, and (2) for socio-ecological justice and the fair distribution of costs and benefits of resource use to meet every human’s basic needs. This study examined a longitudinal intervention to foster individual sufficiency orientation (i.e., a multidimensional construct including both attitudes towards the sufficiency sustainability strategy and corresponding behavioral intentions). We recruited N = 252 participants who participated in a one-week reflective diary-intervention to increase sufficiency orientation in everyday life and assessed sufficiency orientation, basic psychological need satisfaction, self-reflection, subjective well-being, and time affluence before (T1), directly after (T2), and four weeks after the intervention (T3). Contrary to our predictions, there was no significant difference between the experimental and the control group. Sufficiency orientation increased across groups. Basic psychological need satisfaction was the strongest predictor of sufficiency orientation. There were positive relations with subjective well-being. Targeting basic psychological need satisfaction, as a potential underlying driver of sufficiency orientation, seems to be a promising avenue for designing interventions. Employing a need-based, humanistic approach to designing psychological interventions is in line with the aims of sufficiency to meet every human’s basic needs, in a socio-ecologically just world.

Changing Pro-Environmental Behavior: Evidence from (Un)Successful Intervention Studies

“…Next to these cross-sectional studies, two online studies also used a longitudinal approach, measuring pro-environmental behavior at two or more time points and administering the intervention in between. Kesenheimer and Greitemeyer [22] examined whether daily text message appeals would increase pro-environmental donations and pro-environmental behavior on a multi-item self-report scale, and Tröger and colleagues [23] investigated the effect of reflective diary-writing on self-reported sufficiency-oriented behaviors.…”

Sufficiency in Business

“…The results showed that a sufficiency message emphasizing a dynamic norm had no particularly significant effects compared to the two other conditions. Furthermore, in a diary intervention study that aimed at increasing sufficiency orientation and consumption, it was shown that simply being part of the experiment increased participants' pro-sufficiency attitudes after a one-week diary intervention and remained at that level for four weeks thereafter (Tröger et al 2021). These studies indicate that businesses, which decide to promote sufficiency to their customers through advertising and communication efforts, might have only a limited impact on customer behavior.…”

“…Perhaps unsurprisingly, research also suggests that most of the strategies implemented to enable sufficiency-oriented consumption can be categorized as "shallow", as they focus primarily on knowledge and support, such as communication campaigns (e.g., Svenfelt et al 2022). These strategies have been shown to be inadequate in influencing intentions and decisions towards sufficiency-oriented behaviors, for example in online environments, where they are overshadowed by frequent pro-consumption advertisements (e.g., Frick et al 2021a;Tröger et al 2021).…”

“…This conflict of interest can create tensions within companies and discourage them from adopting sufficiency strategies . Second, despite their limited effectiveness in guiding consumer choices in the long term (Frick et al 2021a;Tröger et al 2021;Gossen et al 2023), one of the most common strategies used by companies to promote sufficiency-oriented consumption are communication and information campaigns.…”

Reducing students’ ecological footprints through self-developed interventions

“…A diary containing open questions about the process was used to record the participants' reflections on the intervention process. This qualitative tool is commonly used in mixed methods studies; it provides additional perspectives on data collected through other approaches (Cucu-Oancea, 2013), and it has been useful in recent research on increasing sustainable behaviour (see Tröger et al, 2021). Items in the diary included once-off tasks requesting students to describe the process of selecting interventions, record their impressions of the intervention week as a daily task, and indicate what they had learnt about reducing their EF as well as using an intervention for broader application.…”