Linking Perceived Policy Effectiveness and Proenvironmental Behavior: The Influence of Attitude, Implementation Intention, and Knowledge

Abstract

Residents’ behavior is the result of the combined effect of external environment factors and internal psychological factors. Based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the attitude–behavior–condition (ABC) theory, this study aims to explore the impact of policy support on residents’ psychological factors and proenvironmental behavior. This study developed an extended TPB and ABC model and replaced the behavioral intention in the TPB model with implementation intentions to enhance the ability of the variables to explain and predict proenvironmental behavior. The longitudinal research method was adopted to collect data through a two-stage questionnaire survey of 1145 Shanghai residents. Results demonstrated that perceived policy effectiveness has a significant and positive impact on attitude, implementation intention, and proenvironmental behavior. This means that proenvironmental behavior tends to appear in people with a high perception of policy effectiveness, positive attitude, and strong implementation intention. Moreover, this study points out for the first time that high waste management knowledge weakens the relationship between perceived policy effectiveness and attitude. For residents with high waste management knowledge, the effect of simple policy publicity is limited. The findings suggest that the government should increase the breadth and depth of policy support and policy publicity to cover the entire waste management process.

Public support for policies to improve population and planetary health: A population-based online experiment assessing impact of communicating evidence of multiple versus single benefits

“…Assuming policy support is a manifestation of an attitude towards a policy, increasing perceived policy effectiveness through communicating evidence of a policy's effectiveness, could in theory change attitudes towards a policy by changing policy-related beliefs and policy-related outcome expectancies. This is supported by the results of recent studies showing that perceived policy effectiveness has a significant and positive impact on policy attitudes ( Chu et al, 2021 ; H. Wang et al, 2021 ). It should be noted, however, that the relationship between policy support and attitudes towards a policy is not necessarily straightforward.…”

Edible Insects: How to Increase the Sustainable Consumption Behavior among Restaurant Consumers

“…The partnerships with environmentalist to initiate pubic campaigns would be helpful to strengthen the subjective norm which in turn increases behavioral intentions. Recently, there is a rising celebrity endorsement in the consumptions of edible insect-based foods and it was verified as a powerful tool to induce consumers’ positive behavior [ 59 ]. Hence, the cooperation with various influencers would be an effective way to increase individuals’ pro-environmental behavior toward edible insect restaurants.…”

“…Second, there are meaningful practical implications that can be extracted from the moderating effect of product knowledge in the link between subjective norm and behavioral intentions. Developing product knowledge is of importance in the domain of an edible insect restaurant and operators in the food industry are suggested to constantly seek for ways to engage with potential customers to educate the substantial values of edible insects [ 9 , 59 ]. Therefore, as part of greener practices in the restaurant industry, running a series of educational forums in the community level would be effective to enhance their knowledge as well as encourage social influence.…”

“…The authors then suggested educational programs to improve individuals’ knowledge in order to increase the chance of purchasing insect-based food. More recently, Wang et al [ 59 ] studied the role of waste management knowledge in the formation of consumers’ pro-environmental behavior and they tested the moderating effect of knowledge in the relationship between attitude and intention. Thus, the strength of the links among constructs rooted from the TPB may differ across high and low product knowledge group.…”

Does Government-Led Publicity Enhance Corporate Green Behavior? Empirical Evidence from Green Xuanguan in China

“…Zhang et al [58] also applied this theory to study the relationship between employee perception, employee attitude, and employee behavior in nuclear power plants. The framework of publicity (information)-intention/perception-behavior has been appropriately modified by many documents according to their research problems and logic [48,[59][60][61][62]. Wang et al [63] combined TPB with the norm activation model (NAM) to study the effect of information publicity on the behavioral intention of residents' e-waste recycling.…”