Testing for the size heuristic in householders’ perceptions of energy consumption

Cowen, Laura; Gatersleben, Birgitta

doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2017.10.002

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…In line with these findings, earlier studies focused on erroneous ways of reasoning which are biases influencing evaluations regarding the understanding of the environmental impact of food behaviors (Holmgren, Kabanshi, Marsh, & Sörqvist, 2018a). In the past studies, it was revealed that people's assessment of the impact of a food product on the environment depends on external factors such as symbolically meaningful information (Sütterlin & Siegrist, 2014), size (Cowen & Gatersleben, 2017) and eco-labels . Therefore, consumers supposed that their choices toward pro-environmentally behaviors make compensations for less proenvironmentally behaviors (Kaklamanou, Jones, Webb, & Walker 2015).…”

Section: Negative Footprint Illusionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Pre-Service Science Teachers’ Perceptual Biases Regarding Sustainable Food Consumption: Negative Footprint Illusion

Ateş

2020

IJRES

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Global warming presents a threat for human and nature systems. For a few decades, sustainable food consumption behaviors have been considered remarkable to protect environmental sources. Changes in food consumption behaviors can benefit in improving environmental quality. While consumers are trying to reduce their environmental impact, it is needed to study what consumers think about the environmental impact of their consumption preferences. Earlier studies reported that sustainable conditions can bias judgments, since when an unsustainable plus a sustainable condition is thought as less environmentally impactful than the sustainable condition alone called “negative footprint illusion”. In line with this, the current study aimed to examine negative footprint perceptual biases regarding sustainable food consumption. A within-subjects design was used with a total of 165 pre-service teachers studying at the department of science education in a mid-sized university in Turkey. Data were collected through a series of scales developed by Gorissen and Weijters (2016). The scales include three-meal menu food types including ‘standard menu condition’, ‘sustainable-addition condition’, and ‘unsustainable-addition condition’. Participants were asked to evaluate the environmental impact of these menu conditions independently. The results of the study indicated that the participants believed that ‘sustainable-addition condition’ has a lower environmental impact than ‘standard menu condition’, even though ‘sustainable-addition condition’ indicates higher environmental impact- indicating a negative footprint illusion. It can be concluded that pre-service science teachers have perceptual biases related to sustainable food consumption even when they have enough knowledge related to environmental issues.

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Section: Negative Footprint Illusionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Pre-Service Science Teachers’ Perceptual Biases Regarding Sustainable Food Consumption: Negative Footprint Illusion

Ateş

2020

IJRES

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“…Gilovich et al, 2002), which is the idea that "when confronted with a difficult question people often answer an easier one instead, usually without being aware of the substitution" (Kahneman & Frederick, 2002, p. 53). For example, when asked to judge the energy consumption of appliances such as a fridge or a kettle people overestimate the energy consumption of large appliances (Cowen & Gatersleben, 2017), underestimate the energy consumption of small appliances (Baird & Brier, 1981) and associate a long duration of use with higher energy consumption (Chisik, 2011, september). In these cases, the target attribute that is central to the difficult question being asked by the experimenter relates to how much energy an appliance consumes, whereas the heuristic attribute that is implicitly "substituted" into an easier question that is formulated by the participant relates to appliance size or duration of appliance use.…”

Section: Cognitive Biases In the Environmental Domainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can the negative footprint illusion be eliminated by summative priming?

Holmgren

Andersson

Ball

et al. 2021

Journal of Cognitive Psychology

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People's belief that one or more environmentally friendly items that are added to a set of conventional items can reduce the total environmental impact of these items (the negative footprint illusion) could lead to unwanted environmental consequences. An averaging bias seems to underpin this illusion: people make their estimates based on the average of the environmental impact produced by the items rather than the accumulated sum. We report four studies that used various priming manipulations to explore whether people's preoccupation to think in terms of an average can be eliminated by fostering a summative mindset. The results demonstrate that participants avoid succumbing to the negative footprint illusion when the critical judgment task is preceded by tasks that engender a summation judgment. Our evidence indicates that the negative footprint illusion can be tempered when a primed concept (summation) is used adaptively on subsequent judgments, thereby correcting for bias in environmental judgments.

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“…Some of the aforementioned studies found participants employed heuristics when judging the energy consumption of household appliances (Baird & Brier, 1981;Chisik, 2011;Cowen & Gatersleben, 2017;Schuitema & Steg, 2005). Heuristics are simple rules used to reduce the cognitive load of decision-making and prevent information overload (Chaiken, 1980).…”

Section: Heuristics In Energy Judgementmentioning

confidence: 99%