Abstract
Promoting pro-environmental behavior faces multiple challenges. Promoting new pro-environmental behaviors is even more challenging, due to additional barriers, such as perceived lack of information. Traditional pro-environmental communication often either encourages desired behaviors or discourages undesired behaviors. We argue that separately, these two approaches are limited in their ability to elicit perceptions of informativeness and therefore they may not be effective enough in the context of new pro-environmental behaviors, because of the profound need in educating the public about these new behaviors. Addressing this challenge, we test across six studies the effectiveness of a communication approach based on education psychology (specifically the “behavior reorientation” approach), which combines the encouraging and the discouraging language in a single integrated message. In three large field experiments and a field survey we find that, compared with communication that uses separately an encouraging or a discouraging message, a combined message that integrates both approaches elicits higher engagement with new pro-environmental behaviors. Three follow-up online studies demonstrate that the effect of the combined message occurs only in the context of new (rather than established) pro-environmental behaviors, and show the mediating role of perceived informativeness, echoing the need for education in such contexts.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 101945 |
Journal | Journal of Environmental Psychology |
Volume | 86 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022 Elsevier Ltd
Funding
This research was supported by the ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (grant No. 789167/ ). This research was also supported by the Henry Crown Institute of Business Research in Israel, Tel Aviv University . This research was supported by the ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (grant No. 789167/). This research was also supported by the Henry Crown Institute of Business Research in Israel, Tel Aviv University.We designed a sponsored slideshow advertisement campaign (Graham, Milner, Saul, & Pfaff, 2008; Lohse, 2013) to run on Facebook for three months from January 25th to April 25th, 2017. We limited the audience's age range to 25–45, because this is the primary target market of GC. The campaign's optimization goal was based on Reach – the number of unique people who see the content of the ad. Since we opt for maximizing Reach, we limited the frequency – the number of times each user is exposed to the ad – so that each user was exposed to the ad up to six times, on average, for the entire campaign duration. This limitation intended to minimize negative feelings towards the ads due to excessive advertising frequency (Hitchon & Thorson, 1995). The campaign's bid strategy was lowest cost, and the charge was per impression – the number of times the ad appeared on the screen. The stimuli were chosen in accordance with past GC campaigns and depicted visuals of growing hydroponic vegetables on a windowsill or on a rooftop (see Fig. 1 with English translations). Depending on city of residence (CITY1, CITY2 or CITY3), targeted Facebook users were exposed to one of our three messages. The Facebook users then could engage with the ad via multiple actions, such as clicking the ad, sharing, commenting, or clicking link to GC website. We designed a different landing page on GC's website for each of the conditions, to capture post-Facebook engagement behavior. Additional technical details about the campaign are provided in Web Appendix 2.
Funders | Funder number |
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Henry Crown Institute of Business Research in Israel | |
Henry Crown Institute of Business Research in Israel, Tel Aviv University.We | |
Israel Science Foundation | 789167/ |
Tel Aviv University |
Keywords
- Education
- Environmental communication
- Field experiment
- New pro-environmental behavior