Highlighting the important role of marketing in encouraging sustainable consumption, the current research presents a review of the academic literature from marketing and behavioral science that examines the most effective ways to shift consumer behaviors to be more sustainable. In the process of the review, the authors develop a comprehensive framework for conceptualizing and encouraging sustainable consumer behavior change. The framework is represented by the acronym SHIFT, and it proposes that consumers are more inclined to engage in pro-environmental behaviors when the message or context leverages the following psychological factors: Social influence, Habit formation, Individual self, Feelings and cognition, and Tangibility. The authors also identify five broad challenges to encouraging sustainable behaviors and use these to develop novel theoretical propositions and directions for future research. Finally, the authors outline how practitioners aiming to encourage sustainable consumer behaviors can use this framework.

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The potential for deceased-donor organ transplants to save lives is severely limited by the number of people registered as donors around the world. Various national and regional health organizations often emphasize low registration rates (i.e., low descriptive norms) in an effort to demonstrate need and encourage registration. However, we predict and find that combining low descriptive norms with high injunctive norms, making salient the discrepancy between what people think they should do and what they actually do, results in greater organ donor registrations than communicating either descriptive or injunctive norms separately. We demonstrate these effects across three focal studies and two follow-up studies conducted online, in the laboratory, and in the field, and show that the findings are mediated by feelings of responsibility. We also demonstrate that making the situation feel psychologically close increases responsibility and intentions to register for low descriptive and high injunctive norms, to the level of combined norms. Our research contributes to the literature on norms and responsibility and can help policymakers and marketers design more effective communication strategies.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public health behaviour, we present a dataset comprising of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries. This dataset was collected for the International Collaboration on Social & Moral Psychology of COVID-19 project (ICSMP COVID-19). This social science survey invited participants around the world to complete a series of moral and psychological measures and public health attitudes about COVID-19 during an early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic (between April and June 2020). The survey included seven broad categories of questions: COVID-19 beliefs and compliance behaviours; identity and social attitudes; ideology; health and well-being; moral beliefs and motivation; personality traits; and demographic variables. We report both raw and cleaned data, along with all survey materials, data visualisations, and psychometric evaluations of key variables.

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