Harnessing the unconscious mind of the consumer: How implicit attitudes predict pre-conscious visual attention to carbon footprint information on products

Abstract

Consumers clearly have a role to play in the global fight against climate change since even relatively small changes in patterns of household consumption could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But what evidence is there that consumers do consider the environmental impacts of products when shopping? Indeed, how psychologically salient are the carbon footprint labels now appearing on a range of products in various countries?Here we test the psychological salience of this information using eye-tracking to identify, on a frame-by-frame basis, individual fixations on various features of the packaging, including carbon footprint. We found that the mean fixation level for carbon footprint was 12.2%, indicating it was indeed as salient as other important features. High or low levels of carbon footprint had no significant 2 effect on gaze fixation. We also found no significant relationship between selfreported attitudes to low carbon products and overall level of fixation, nor was there any significant relationship between implicit attitude and level of fixation.But implicit attitude did significantly impact on the point of first fixation, in that those with a strong positive implicit attitude were significantly more likely to fixate first on carbon footprint information. This suggests that carbon labelling could potentially be effective for some consumers, those with the right implicit attitude. Measures of explicit attitude, on the other hand, seemed to be largely irrelevant. The implications of this finding for sparking a 'green revolution' in consumer habits through the provision of carbon footprint information for consumers is discussed.

Carbon labels on restaurant menus: do people pay attention to them?

“…Eye movements are proxies of attention and the acquisition of information (Wedel & Pieters, 2008). A few eye-tracking studies investigate attention to labels that signal the environmental sustainability of products (Beattie & McGuire, 2015;Beattie, McGuire, & Sale, 2010;Samant & Seo, 2016;Van Loo et al, 2015), suggesting that understanding of an importance assigned to sustainability labels lead to higher attention (Samant & Seo, 2016;Van Loo et al, 2015). In the restaurant menu context, a few studies investigated how restaurant customers read menus using eye-tracking (e.g.…”

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“…Spence, Poortinga, Butler, & Pidgeon, 2011) and their agreement with pro-environmental attitudes. Beattie and Sale (2009) reported about 70 percent of surveyed individuals expressed a preference for low carbon products recognized by carbon footprint information on product labels. In addition, the resistance to more sustainable behavior is not attributable to insufficient knowledge about climate change (Pidgeon, 2012).…”

Mapping our underlying cognitions and emotions about good environmental behavior: Why we fail to act despite the best of intentions

“…Previous research has identified an intention-behaviour gap when considering the adoption of sustainable behaviour (Bamberg 2003). It has been hypothesised in the past that this gap may be due to a dissociation between explicit and implicit attitude -explicit self-report attitudes to the environment may be positive, but underlying implicit attitudes may not, and these implicit attitudes may be more influential for guiding certain aspects of behaviour (Beattie 2010;Beattie and McGuire 2015). However, as participants appeared to report this contradiction by explicitly scoring their environmental behaviour as lower than environmental concern, it could also be explained by a lack of awareness of how to act in a sustainable way.…”

“…However, carbon labelling clearly does need to be simple (such as the traffic signal approach) to have the desired effect in the time frame required for supermarket shopping. Carbon labelling that is not simple does not seem to attract the visual attention of consumers in that very short time frame, (Beattie 2012b), except for those with the necessary very positive implicit attitude (Beattie and McGuire 2015).…”

“…Implicit attitudes have been measured using the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee and Schwartz 1998). This is designed to probe the associative connections between concepts (for example high/low carbon products and the evaluative concepts of good/bad) and it has been found repeatedly that in the domain of sustainability explicit (self-report) attitudes and implicit attitudes (measures using the IAT) do not correlate (Beattie 2010;Sale 2009, 2011;Beattie and McGuire 2015). Further, implicit attitudes seems to affect visual attention to climate change images in a way that self-report attitudes do not (Beattie and McGuire 2012), as well as visual attention to carbon footprint information on products, at least in the short time frames important in actual shopping (Beattie, McGuire and Sale 2011;Beattie and McGuire 2015).…”