The Welsh Single-Use Carrier Bag Charge and behavioural spillover

Thomas, Gregory Owen; Poortinga, Wouter; Сауткина, Елена

doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2016.05.008

Cited by 115 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…We know, for example, that those who reuse carrier bags are no more likely to do any other waste reduction or pro-environmental behaviours including buying products with less packaging, recycling, or repairing items instead of buying something new (Poortinga et al, 2013); and that recycling all possible domestic waste can be used to alleviate guilt about not undertaking more difficult pro-environmental behaviours like flying less (Barr et al, 2010). This 'moral licensing' effect and its converse, behavioural spillover (where adopting one pro-environmental behaviour leads to adoption of additional, pro-environmental behaviours), are attracting increasing attention in the environmental social science literature (Thomas et al, 2016;Whitmarsh & O'Neill, 2010;Thøgersen, 1999;Thøgersen & Olander, 2003), but especially in relation to material consumption behaviours are little understood. There is some evidence that green consumption behaviours are offset by less sustainable choices as a result of moral licensing (Panzone et al, 2012).…”

Section: Who Is Reducing Their Materials Consumption and Why?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Who is reducing their material consumption and why? A cross-cultural analysis of dematerialization behaviours

Whitmarsh

Capstick

Nash

2017

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.

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SummaryThe environmental and economic imperatives to dematerialise economies, or 'do more with less', have been established for some years. Yet, to date little is known about the personal drivers associated with dematerialising. This paper explores the prevalence and profile of those who are taking action to reduce consumption in different cultural contexts (UK and Brazil) and considers influences on dematerialisation behaviours. We find exemplar behaviours (avoiding buying new things and avoiding packaging) are far less common than archetypal environmental behaviours (e.g., recycling), but also that cultural context is important (Brazilians are more likely to reduce their material consumption than people in the UK). We also find the two dematerialisation behaviours are associated with different pro-environmental actions (more radical action versus green consumption, respectively); and have distinct, but overlapping, psychological (e.g., identity) and socio-demographic (e.g., education) predictors. Comparing a more traditional valueidentity model of pro-environmental behaviour with a motivation-based (self-determination) model, we find the latter explains somewhat more variance than the former. However, overall little variance is explained, suggesting that additional factors at the personal and structural levels are important for determining these consumption behaviours. We conclude by outlining policy implications and avenues for further research.

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Section: Who Is Reducing Their Materials Consumption and Why?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Who is reducing their material consumption and why? A cross-cultural analysis of dematerialization behaviours

Whitmarsh

Capstick

Nash

2017

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.

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“…Next to increasing the salience of the plastic carrier bag charge via situational cues at the cashiers desk or during checkout of online grocery store purchases (Figure 4), the carrier bag charge also changes the default options by requiring that consumers opt-in, rather than opt-out, of using carrier bags. Research shows that the carrier bag charge has been highly effective in reducing the use of plastic carrier bags in both Wales and Ireland (Convery, McDonnell, and Ferreira 2007;Thomas, Poortinga, and Sautkina 2016), with consumers opting to bring their own carrier bags rather than purchase those available in store. This suggests that the inclusion of situational cues to highlight a cost of engaging in the habitual behavior can be effectively combined with interventions that change the default options available to consumers, and thus prompt the activation of alternative situated conceptualizations.…”

Section: Adding Situational Cues That Increase the Salience Of Negatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Right Here, Right Now: Situated Interventions to Change Consumer Habits

Best¹,

Papies²

2017

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research

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Consumer behavior-change interventions have traditionally encouraged consumers to form conscious intentions but, in the past decade, it has been shown that whilst these interventions have a medium-to-large effect in changing intentions, they have a much smaller effect in changing behavior. Consumers often do not act in accordance with their conscious intentions because situational cues in the immediate environment automatically elicit learned, habitual behaviors. It has therefore been suggested that researchers re-focus their efforts on developing interventions that target unconscious, unintentional influences on behavior, such as cuebehavior ('habit') associations. To develop effective consumer behavior-change interventions, however, we argue that it is first important to understand how consumer experiences are represented in memory, in order to successfully target the situational cues that most strongly predict engagement in habitual behavior. In this article, we present a situated cognition perspective of habits, and discuss how the situated cognition perspective extends our understanding of how consumer experiences are represented in memory, and the processes through which these situational representations can be retrieved in order to elicit habitual consumer behaviors. Based on the principles of situated cognition, we then discuss five ways interventions could change consumer habits by targeting situational cues in the consumer environment, and suggest how existing interventions utilizing these behaviorchange strategies could be improved by integrating the principles of the situated cognition approach.

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“…Extrinsic motivations are fickle triggers for behaviour. The desired behaviour might stop as soon as the incentives stop, householders may even recycle less with incentive programmes in place [20], and desirable spill-over to other pro-environmental behaviours may be limited [21]. Psychologically, it would be preferable to build intrinsic motivations for better waste management and recycling.…”

Section: Progress In Policymentioning

confidence: 99%