Sustainable Consumption Dilemmas

Abstract

Abstract:To examine which considerations play a role when individuals make decisions to purchase sustainable product varieties or not, we have conducted a large scale field experiment with more than 600 participating households. Households can vote on whether the budgets they receive should only be spent on purchasing the sustainable product variety, or whether every household in a group is free to spend their budget on any product variety. By conducting several treatments, we tested whether people tend to view sustainable consumption as a social dilemma or as a moral dilemma. We find little support for the hypothesis that social dilemma considerations are the key drivers of sustainable consumption behaviour. Participants seem to be caught in a moral dilemma in which they not only weigh their individual financial costs with the sustainable benefits but they also consider the consequences of restricting other people's freedom of choice. Complementary survey results further substantiate this claim and show that many people are reluctant to impose restrictions on their peers, but, at the same time, our results also suggest substantial support for the government to regulate the availability of unsustainable product varieties.

Modelling the consumer decision‐making process to identify key drivers and bottlenecks in the adoption of environmentally friendly products

“…Recently, Claudy, Peterson, and O'Driscoll () empirically showed that behavioural reasoning theory (BRT), the key premise of which is that people use different and distinct psychological processes when making behavioural decisions, can successfully explain consumer behaviour in regard to the adoption of renewable energy and overcoming the attitude‐behaviour gap. Vringer, Vollebergh, van Soest, van der Heijden, and Dietz () designed and conducted a quasi‐experiment to test the attitude‐behaviour gap for two familiar products with two distinct sustainability problems: animal welfare in relation to meat and poverty in relation to chocolate. Their analysis of the results suggested that this gap could be overcome by sharing the fact that others buy sustainable products, because people are more inclined to buy sustainable product varieties if they think others are buying them, too.…”

Sustainable Consumer Behaviour: A Collection of Empirical Studies

“…Sustainable Consumption Dilemmas [3] considers both the social dilemma and moral dilemma aspects of sustainable consumer behaviour with respect to meat consumption. Unlike most studies, real behaviour has been studied in a large-scale field experiment in which participants received credit which was large enough to cover the extra costs of buying organic meat as compared with conventional meat.…”

Analysing the failure factors of eco‐friendly home appliances based on a user‐centered approach

“…As environmental problems become worse, consumers become more inclined towards sustainable consumption. Contrary to this, consumers also suffer from a consumption dilemma where sustainable consumption is not realistic (Vringer, Vollebergh, van Soest, van der Heijden, & Dietz, ). To encourage green consumption, many researchers have studied attitude‐behaviour gaps in pro‐environmental product purchases (Burke, Eckert, & Davis, ; Claudy, Peterson, & O'Driscoll, ; Hess, Stathopoulos, & Daly, ; Jung, Chan‐Olmsted, Park, & Kim, ; Olson, ).…”