Conceptualizing sustainable consumption priming: A scoping review

Abstract

While many psychological interventions encourage sustainable consumption by altering attitudes, these modified attitudes often do not result in sustainable choices leading to the need to test alternative interventions to facilitate sustainable consumption, such as priming. Priming uses stimuli that trigger nonconscious processing that influences decisions. Despite its popularity, studies that employ priming strategies in sustainable consumption research are widely dispersed across several conceptual domains. This article unpacks and summarizes different approaches to priming sustainable behavior by delineating theoretical and methodological perspectives in various contexts across diverse consumer characteristics. The method employed is a scoping review of 74 articles published over 23 years (2000–2022). The resulting review (1) provides an overview of priming in sustainable consumption, (2) highlights knowledge gaps, (3) identifies knowledge clusters, and (4) proposes a research agenda for future investigations. Primarily, this paper provides an integrated map that deconstructs how researchers have explored priming interventions to promote sustainable consumption and to enable the best, or at least, better practice.