The Role of Social Media Normative Interventions and Environmental Awareness in Intentions to Change Pro-Environmental Behaviors

Abstract

Social media interventions to stimulate the adoption of pro-environmental behaviors is a topic of increasing interest in both Information Systems (IS) research and environmental studies. Yet, we still know little about the factors explaining the effectiveness of such interventions and how they influence decision-making in online social networks. By bringing together insights from both social science and IS research streams, this research-inprogress studies intentions to change towards proenvironmental behaviors as the result of exposure to normative social media content and the level of environmental awareness. We conducted an online experiment to explore intentions to change behaviors regarding the consumption of meat. We find that while individual environmental awareness is positively associated with intentions to change meat consumption, exposure to social norms in social media content is not significant in predicting intentions to change meat consumption. Since our findings suggest the importance of environmental awareness in decision-making towards sustainable behaviors, our future research will explore the inclusion of information provision to stimulate environmental awareness in combination with nudging on social media.

ICT and Environmental Sustainability: A Comparative Study

“…Fourth, the study did not include social media content analysis and its effects on tackling global warming issues. ICT tools such as big data analytics and machine learning in Natural Language Processing (NLP) offer advanced mechanisms to explore social media content [101,102]. As a final point, future studies should also focus on regional violence, wars, and ecological conflict and their impacts on environmental pollution by integrating more measurement analyses such as pollution impacts on health of humans and other inhabitants and species [103][104][105][106].…”