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Environmental Awareness Could Buffer Consumers, Inaction？The Moderation of Skepticism toward Environmental Claims
2018, 41(3):
621-626.
In the face of serious environmental problems and strict environmental regulations, more and more enterprises begin to implement green innovation strategy. But the market shares of green innovative products have not increased significantly over the past decade. Hence, it becomes the responsibility to explore the psychological barriers to buy green products. Despite embracing the values of ethical consumerism, most consumers rarely support their beliefs at the check-out counter, which is considered to be the attitude–behavior gap. This study shed light on the attitude–behavior gap of ethical consumers from the perspective of time reference.
Time reference had a positive predictive effect on the purchase intention of green products (B=0.54, SE=0.22, t=2.43, p=0.02), which meant individuals tended to buy green products in the future rather than now.
On the basis of the above study, we will explore whether environmental awareness as a buffer effect was not regulated by skepticism toward environmental claims. In this study, the two groups were assigned to 0.5 and -0.5, after centering environmental awareness and skepticism toward environmental claims, we got dual interaction (time reference×environmental awareness, time reference×skepticism toward environmental claims, environmental awareness×skepticism toward environmental claims) and three interaction (time reference×environmental awareness×skepticism toward environmental claims). The whole model was extremely significant (R2=0.29, F=7.57, p<0.001). The main effect of time reference was not significant(B=0.33, SE=0.20, t=1.61, p>0.05).The main effect of environmental awareness was significant(B=0.44, SE=0.12, t=3.60, p<0.001), the main effect of skepticism toward environmental claims(B=-0.49, SE=0.12, t=-4, 24, p<0.001)；All the dual interaction was not significant, triple interaction was significant (B=0.45, SE=0.23, t=2.00, p=0.04), the explanatory power of the three interactionsΔR2=0.02, p=0.04.
The analysis of the interaction between environmental awareness and time reference when skepticism toward environmental claims was low. We found that the interaction between environmental awareness and time reference was significant(B=-0.81, SE=0.33, t=-2.46，p=0.02), which meant that environmental awareness could buffer the effect of time reference of green consumption. Specifically, for the subjects with low awareness of environmental protection, the time reference had positive predictive effect on the purchase intention of green products (B=1.21, SE=0.46, t=2.61, p=0.01, but for the subjects with high awareness of environmental protection the time reference had not significant predictive effect (B=-0.14, SE=0.38, t=-0.37, p>0.05). The analysis of the interaction between environmental awareness and time reference when skepticism toward environmental claims was high. We found that the interaction between environmental awareness and time reference was not significant (B=0.19, SE=0.37, t=0.51, p>0.05), which meant that environmental awareness could not buffer the effect of construal level of green innovation consumption.
Conclusion: Time reference had positive predictive effect on the purchase intention of green products, which meant individuals tended to buy green products in the future rather than now. Importantly, skepticism could moderate the buffer effect of environmental awareness. In high level skepticism, environmental awareness could buffer the effect of construal level of green innovation consumption, but in low level skepticism environmental awareness couldn’t buffer the effect.
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