Andrés Barrios, Laurel A. Steinfield, S. Appau, Roland Gau, Charlene A. Dadzie
{"title":"How Does Knowledge Translation Involving (Non)Humans Influence the Adoption of Climate Change Solutions? The Case of Nature-Dependent Prosumers","authors":"Andrés Barrios, Laurel A. Steinfield, S. Appau, Roland Gau, Charlene A. Dadzie","doi":"10.1086/724996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724996","url":null,"abstract":"In this article we use actor-network theory to advance understandings of how nature-dependent “prosumers” adopt climate change solutions. Based on interviews with members from two subsistence farming communities in Colombia, we illustrate how knowledge about climate change and climate change solutions flows across intervention and response networks, formed by human and nonhuman actors, in a dialectical way—sometimes supporting and other times resulting in contradictions/betrayals that limit prosumers’ adoption of sustainable practices. These findings contribute to theories about the diffusion of innovations related to climate change, capturing how knowledge translations processes involves bureaucratic and grassroots knowledge from intervention networks that interacts with reflected knowledge from response networks. It also highlights the key role of nonhuman actors. Our findings offer insights for practitioners by illuminating multiple sources of knowledge and how their interaction can result in supportive versus detracting conditions that can affect whether consumers adopt climate change solutions.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"8 1","pages":"251 - 263"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42176821","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reducing Emissions across the Consumption Cycle and an Agenda for Future Research on Consumers and Climate Change: Introduction to the Special Issue on Climate Change","authors":"Karen Page Winterich, R. W. Reczek, B. Bollinger","doi":"10.1086/724997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724997","url":null,"abstract":"ecent reports indicate urgent action is needed to have a chance to mitigate, or perhaps adapt to, climate change (Plumer and Zhong 2022). Climate change refers to the long-term change in average weather patterns as human emissions of greenhouse gases have increased over the last century, with resulting declines in the health of our environment. These changes have significant impact on such varied outcomes as food production, populationmovement, biodiversity, and humanmental andphysical health, among others. The importance of mitigating climate change is recognized in Goal 13: Climate Action of the United Nation’s 17 integrated Sustainable Development Goals to achieve a more sustainable future for all (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2023). Over two-thirds of global emissions arise from energy use, which includes direct use by consumers, as well as the energy used in the transportation and production of goods and services (Center for Climate and Energy Sources 2023). While consumers can reduce their own energy use via their transportation and home cooling and heating choices, company and government decisions can result in significantly larger reductions. As such, many are beginning to argue that system-level change is necessary, as the magnitude of emissions reductions needed cannot be achieved by focusing solely on individual-level interventions (Chater and Loewenstein 2022). Despite the importance of system-level change and the need to understand consumer response to proposed systemic changes, most of the articles in this special issue focus on how consumers can reduce their individual emissions through their consumption choices, with the goal of mitigating climate change. We therefore first review how the first","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"8 1","pages":"237 - 242"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49167571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Prosocial Social: The Effectiveness of Social Proof for Energy Conservation Using Social Media","authors":"B. Bollinger, K. Gillingham, Kelley Gullo Wight","doi":"10.1086/725031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725031","url":null,"abstract":"Social media can be an effective tool for encouraging prosocial behavior, such as energy conservation, making it a key avenue to address the challenges associated with climate change. We examine how social media can be best leveraged to encourage energy-saving behavior. We theorize that two characteristics of social media messages are of particular importance in the context of nudging prosocial behavior: the recipient’s affiliation with the message sender and whether the content of the message contains a social proof appeal. We use a multimethod approach to test the importance of these characteristics, including a large-scale energy efficiency campaign and a controlled experiment. We find that social media messages sent by a group with which the recipient is affiliated are substantially more effective, particularly when providing evidence of social proof. We discuss the practical impact on the environment.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"8 1","pages":"290 - 300"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42107759","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Born to Be Sustainable: Consumers’ Response toward Luxury Products That Are Born versus Reborn Sustainable","authors":"Inbar Sani-Elia, Dikla Perez, A. Grinstein","doi":"10.1086/724993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724993","url":null,"abstract":"With the rise of environmental consumerism, luxury brands have begun marketing sustainable products. Yet research so far has provided mixed findings with regard to consumers’ attitude toward sustainable luxury products. The current research enriches the ongoing debate of conditions under which consumers are likely to respond favorably to sustainable luxury products. Specifically, this research investigates a fundamental decision luxury brands take in the context of sustainability: whether to design a completely new sustainable luxury product or to redesign an existing luxury product as sustainable. We refer to these two sustainability branding strategies as born and reborn, respectively. Three controlled experiments show that consumers respond to reborn sustainable luxury products less favorably than to born sustainable luxury ones. This effect is mediated by consumers’ perception of the brand sincerity and less relevant for nonluxury products.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"8 1","pages":"327 - 338"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41778337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Recycle Me!” Product Anthropomorphism Can Increase Recycling Behavior","authors":"Alisa Yinghao Wu, Maayan S. Malter, G. Johar","doi":"10.1086/724999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724999","url":null,"abstract":"This article tests a novel intervention for increasing consumer recycling by anthropomorphizing product characteristics. Across five studies, including lab and online studies and a field experiment, we find that consumers are more likely to recycle an anthropomorphized (vs. nonanthropomorphized) product. We argue that anthropomorphism elicits affective (empathy) and cognitive reactions (an abstract construal level), making consumers empathize with the humanlike product as well as focus on the desirable end (vs. undesirable, effortful means) of recycling and therefore increases their likelihood of recycling. We provide evidence for the mediating roles of both affective and cognitive psychological mechanisms and further pin down the role of construal level by manipulating focus on the means (vs. end) of recycling. We discuss the practical implications of these findings for sustainable consumption and addressing climate change.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"8 1","pages":"351 - 363"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43991994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Garrett Rybak, D. Villanova, Scot Burton, Christopher Berry
{"title":"Examining the Effects of Carbon Emission Information on Restaurant Menu Items: Differential Effects of Positive Icons, Negative Icons, and Numeric Disclosures on Consumer Perceptions and Restaurant Evaluations","authors":"Garrett Rybak, D. Villanova, Scot Burton, Christopher Berry","doi":"10.1086/724994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724994","url":null,"abstract":"Recent findings indicate that one-third of man-made greenhouse gas emissions are due to the global food system. Given these findings, several food retailers and restaurants have been exploring ways to communicate carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) information to consumers to provide objectively reliable estimates of emissions associated with individual menu items. Drawing from these retailer innovations and literatures on choice architecture and restaurant calorie labeling, we assess how consumer perceptions about CO2e emissions correspond to objective levels for a pool of restaurant items. We then show how various disclosures of CO2e emissions information, including positive, negative, and neutral formats, may affect results. We also show how CO2e disclosures lead to favorable restaurant outcomes, both directly and indirectly. Results have implications for restaurant management interested in disclosing emission information to consumers and for governmental and nongovernmental agencies interested in marketplace innovations to address global climate change.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"8 1","pages":"314 - 326"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42102496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Does Reframing Fund Carbon Emissions to Increase Their Personal Relevance Boost Investment in Sustainable Funds? Evidence from a Discrete Choice Conjoint Experimental Design","authors":"J. Gladstone, Jake Reynolds, Jairo Ramos","doi":"10.1086/725030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/725030","url":null,"abstract":"The market for green investments can be expanded by providing investors with clear information about the environmental impact of their investment options. Using a discrete choice conjoint experimental design with retail investors (Nchoices=20,874, N=499), we investigate the impact of presenting environmental information in different formats on investment decisions. Drawing on psychological theories of attention and information processing, we test whether reframing the presentation of a fund’s carbon emissions to make them more personally relevant and easier to evaluate leads to increased investment in more sustainable funds. We compare the effectiveness of visual and numeric carbon labels, designed to improve the clarity and comparability of emissions, with analogies equating fund emissions to everyday activities such as cooking, commuting, and watching Netflix, which aim to increase the personal relevance of emissions. We find that, contrary to our predictions, carbon emission labels outperformed analogies in increasing green investment choices.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"8 1","pages":"276 - 289"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47286586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Commentary: A Behavioral Perspective on Climate Inaction","authors":"R. Frank","doi":"10.1086/724991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724991","url":null,"abstract":"T he biggest obstacle to serious climate mitigation efforts is no longer denialism. The recent frequency and intensity of floods, droughts, wildfires, and heat emergencies have persuaded most people that the climate crisis is both real and immediate. Yet inaction persists. Psychologists say it stems partly from a perception that the battle is hopeless (Lertzman 2015), a view with at least three roots: one, a belief that existing policy tools can’t induce the necessary changes in behavior; another, that even if sufficiently powerful tools existed, they would be politically impossible to implement; and a third, that the battle already appears lost—that even if we could eliminate all emissions immediately, existing greenhouse gas concentrations could eventually make the planet unlivable. Here I will survey behavioral evidence that discredits these beliefs—evidence that if more widely disseminated would spur more vigorous mitigation measures. Consider first how peer influences enhance the strength of traditional policy tools. Taxation of cigarettes is a case in point. Because nicotine is highly addictive, critics argued that high cigarette taxes would have little impact on smoking rates. That prediction proved correct in the early going. Most smokers simply paid the taxes. We now see similar skepticism about the efficacy of carbon taxes. But the long-run response to cigarette taxes supports a different projection. Although conventional economic models emphasize the importance of incomes and prices in someone’s decision to smoke, a far stronger influence is the proportion of her close peers who smoke (Mir and Dwyer 2009); the role of social","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"8 1","pages":"243 - 245"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41419568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Xiaoyan Deng, Xiaojing Yang, Yuwei Jiang, Selin A. Malkoc
{"title":"Reflection, Resilience, Rebound: Consumer Coping with the Pandemic","authors":"Xiaoyan Deng, Xiaojing Yang, Yuwei Jiang, Selin A. Malkoc","doi":"10.1086/724545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724545","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses about consumer coping with the pandemic. In the article, authors first offer a comprehensive review of COVID-19 articles published in marketing journals through the resilience lens, using the capital-based approach as a framework. Authors then introduce the nine articles in this special issue to provide a perspective on how consumers accumulate social, human, and economic capital to survive and thrive during the pandemic. Authors conclude by discussing several clusters of topics we hope future research can shed light on. Authors also call for research that documents the differential recovery and resilience paths of the groups of consumers who were particularly hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the high inflation rate, how will the financially disadvantaged consumers cope? How will they prioritize their lives? What kind of community and government resources and support should be put in place for those in the more marginalized groups of society? Which group of consumers will likely sustain a long-term negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic? (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"8 1","pages":"121 - 129"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41758228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Pursuit of the Solitary","authors":"Mark J. Kay, Sophie Kay, F. Cheetham, Hanming Hu","doi":"10.1086/724177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/724177","url":null,"abstract":"Physical distancing and masking due to COVID-19 were initially thought to magnify isolation and loneliness. Instead, pursuits of the solitary have become socially recognized, valued, and positively appraised as engaging experiences of intense concentration. Solitude that is fostered by direct personal agency, individual choice, and commitment includes a diverse range of repetitive, self-regulating, and goal directed activities. These are theorized to constitute disciplined practices that are importantly connected to periods of cognitive and emotional self-development. These spawn positive emotions that function as ethical safeguards to the hazards of conformity.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"8 1","pages":"187 - 194"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49156732","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}