Moral spillover in carbon offset judgments

Abstract

Moral spillover occurs when a morally loaded behavior becomes associated with another source. In the current paper, we addressed whether the moral motive behind causing CO2 emissions spills over on to how much people think is needed to compensate for the emissions. Reforestation (planting trees) is a common carbon-offset technique. With this in mind, participants estimated the number of trees needed to compensate for the carbon emissions from vehicles that were traveling with various moral motives. Two experiments revealed that people think larger carbon offsets are needed to compensate for the emissions when the emissions are caused by traveling for immoral reasons, in comparison with when caused by traveling for moral reasons. Hence, moral motives influence people’s judgments of carbon-offset requirements even though these motives have no bearing on what is compensated for. Moreover, the effect was insensitive to individual differences in carbon literacy and gender and to the unit (kilograms or tons) in which the CO2 emissions were expressed to the participants. The findings stress the role of emotion in how people perceive carbon offsetting.

New Trends in Consumption in Poland as Shown by the Example of a Freeshop Concept

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Thermostat Anchors: Do Temperature Scale Characteristics Affect the Selection of Temperature Setpoints for Residential Homes?

“…In this mix of factors that determine the energy balance of residential homes, human behavior plays a pivotal role as several of the known factors related to residential energy use have a behavioral component [9][10][11]. For example, previous research has demonstrated relationships between residents' energy consumption and their attitudes [12], value orientation [13,14], and reasoning [15,16]. This study set out to contribute to the literature on socio-technical systems by focusing on a behavior that greatly affects the energy balance of residential homes: the selection of temperature setpoints.…”

All's eco‐friendly that ends eco‐friendly: Short‐term memory effects in carbon footprint estimates of temporal item sequences

“…Judgments of environmental impact are influenced by several systematic biases (Holmgren, Andersson, & Sörqvist, 2018; Pasca, 2022; Pasca & Poggio, 2021; Sokolova et al, 2023; Sörqvist et al, 2020). For example, while people accurately assign a higher carbon footprint to two petrol cars in comparison with one petrol car, they tend to think two hybrid cars have the same impact as one (Kim & Schuldt, 2018)—a quantity insensitivity (Kusch & Fiebelkorn, 2019); when people judge how much carbon binding is necessary to compensate for a specific amount of CO 2 emission, they tend to think more is needed when the emissions are caused by an immoral action (Sörqvist, MacCutcheon, et al, 2022)—a moral spillover; when people rate the energy intensiveness of household appliances, they tend to assign higher values to larger objects although the opposite is often more accurate (Cowen & Gatersleben, 2017)—a size heuristic; and when a meal with red meat (a relatively carbon footprint intensive food type) is combined with an organic apple (a side dish with a relatively low carbon footprint), the perceived carbon footprint of the whole meal is reduced (Gorissen & Weijters, 2016)—a negative footprint illusion (Holmgren et al, 2018, 2018).…”