The role of moral foundations, anticipated guilt and personal responsibility in predicting anti-consumption for environmental reasons

Culiberg, Barbara (author), Cho, Hichang (author), Kos Koklič, Mateja (author), Žabkar, Vesna (author)

In response to the growing importance of environmental issues, more and more consumers are turning to anti-consumption by reducing, rejecting, or avoiding consumption. Covering the intersection of sustainable consumption and anti-consumption, previous studies relied on socio-cognitive models to explain this decision. In order to extend their findings, we consider the moral and emotional perspectives to examine reducing consumption for environmental reasons in a particular context, i.e. air travel. It is against this backdrop that we propose a conceptual model that includes moral foundations as the main antecedent, followed by anticipated guilt and personal responsibility, while intention to reduce consumption (i.e. air travel) for environmental reasons, positive word of mouth about reducing air travel (WOM) and environmental activism represent the outcomes. The proposed model is tested on a sample of 511 respondents from a UK online consumer panel. Our results confirm the importance of moral foundations, anticipated guilt and personal responsibility and their interplay in the pre- diction of intention to reduce consumption for environmental reasons. Anticipated guilt influences WOM, while personal responsibility influences activism. In addition, intentions to reduce consumption for environmental reasons have a positive impact on WOM and environmental activism. There are several implications for public policy makers and NGOs that fight against climate change that derive from these findings, as well as research opportunities for academics interested in this topic.

• Language: English
• Keywords: consumption, environmental protection, consumer behaviour, moral foundations, air travel, anti-consumption, environmental activism, anticipated guilt, personal responsibility, WOM
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: EF - School of Economics and Business
• Publication status: In print
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2022
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-135403
• UDC: 339.138
• ISSN on article: 0167-4544
• DOI: 10.1007/s10551-021-05016-7
• COBISS.SI-ID: 92704771
• Publication date in RUL: 11.03.2022

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Journal of business ethics
• Shortened title: J. bus. ethics
• Publisher: Springer
• ISSN: 0167-4544
• COBISS.SI-ID: 1051932

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.
• Licensing start date: 08.01.2022

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: potrošnja, varstvo okolja, vedenje potrošnikov

Projects

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Funding programme: Raziskovalni program
• Project number: P5-0128
• Name: Izzivi vključujočega in trajnostnega razvoja v prevladujoči paradigmi ekonomskih in poslovnih znanosti