Spillover Effect of Digital Green Behavior: Mediation of Identity and Moderation of Psychological Ownership

She Shengxiang; Li Shicheng; Chen Jing; Sheng Guanghua

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230519

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2023, Vol. 46 ›› Issue (5) : 1180-1187. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230519

Social，Personality & Organizational Psychology

Spillover Effect of Digital Green Behavior: Mediation of Identity and Moderation of Psychological Ownership

She Shengxiang^1,2, Li Shicheng³, Chen Jing^4,5, Sheng Guanghua⁶

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Abstract

Digital green behavior refers to digitizing the pro-environmental behaviors in people's daily life by means of information technology and recording, presenting and disseminating it in the internet world in the form of text, graphics and video, so as to endow it with symbolic, playful, social and other attributes. This study takes the green energy collection behavior of Alibaba ant forest as the research object to gain insight into the impact of previous digital green behavior on individuals' subsequent digital green behavior and the mechanism. Ant forest is an environmental public welfare project launched by Alibaba in China. It transforms the green life behaviors of Alipay users such as walking, public transportation, and online payment into digital green energy. When green energy is collected to a certain quantity, users can apply for planting trees or protecting a nature reserve. Based on the literature of pro-environmental behavior spillover effect, environmental self-identity and psychological ownership, this study constructed a conceptual model of digital green behavior spillover effect, and put forward four hypotheses. H1: Green energy collection behavior can positively affect ant forest support. H2: Environmental self-identity can mediate the impact of green energy collection behavior on ant forest support. H3: Psychological ownership can positively moderate the impact of green energy collection behavior on ant forest support. H4: Psychological ownership can positively moderate the impact of environmental self-identity on ant forest support.
This study adopted a 2 (green energy collection behavior: high, low) × 2 (psychological ownership: strong, neutral) between-subject experimental design. The mediating variable is environmental self-identity, and the dependent variable is ant forest support intention, including purchase intention of products from the ant forest and donation amount willing to provide for reserves. Relying on the "Credamo", a professional survey platform in China, we designed the questionnaire and used the sample tracking function, and finally got 199 valid answers. The study was divided into two stages. In the first stage, the questionnaire was distributed to find two groups of subjects with different levels of green energy collection behavior, and then the high-level and low-level groups were randomly divided into two groups respectively. In the second stage, the psychological ownership manipulation was carried out. Drawing on the practice of peck et al. (2021), we primed psychological ownership by highlighting that the reserve or trees are named by the subjects' nicknames.
The results showed that: (1) Green energy collection behavior had a significant positive impact on purchase intention and pro-environmental donation. (2) Environmental self-identity mediated the relationship between green energy collection behavior and support intention. (3) Psychological ownership moderated the impact of environmental self-identity on ant forest support intention. For those who primed strong psychological ownership, the positive impact of environmental self-identity on purchase intention was obviously stronger than the counterpart. In addition, in neutral conditions, environmental self-identity had no significant impact on pro-environmental donation, while in the condition of strong psychological ownership, environmental self-identity had a significant positive impact on pro-environmental donation. This study expands the research on pro-environmental behavior spillover, deepens the understanding of psychological ownership, and contributes a useful exploration for promoting human sustainable behavior through digital pro-environmental behavior.

Key words

digital green behavior / ant forest / pro-environmental behavior spillover / psychological ownership / environmental self-identity

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She Shengxiang, Li Shicheng, Chen Jing, Sheng Guanghua. Spillover Effect of Digital Green Behavior: Mediation of Identity and Moderation of Psychological Ownership[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2023, 46(5): 1180-1187 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230519

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