Home Linguistics & Semiotics Talking green and acting green are two different things: An experimental investigation of the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes and low carbon consumer choice
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Talking green and acting green are two different things: An experimental investigation of the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes and low carbon consumer choice

  • Laura McGuire EMAIL logo and Geoffrey Beattie
Published/Copyright: January 25, 2019
Semiotica
From the journal Semiotica Volume 2019 Issue 227

Abstract

One major assumption in the climate change debate is that because respondents report positive attitudes to the environment and to low carbon lifestyles they will subsequently engage in environmentally friendly/low carbon behaviors when given the right guidance or information. Many governmental agencies have based their climate change strategy on this basic assumption, despite some anxiety about the value-action gap in psychology more generally. Here we test this assumption. We investigated the relationship between explicit and implicit attitudes to carbon footprint, and both self-reports of environmental behavior and low carbon behavioral choices. We found that self-reported attitudes to carbon footprint were significantly associated only with self-reported environmental and self-reported low-carbon behaviors. They were not significantly associated with the choice of low carbon alternatives in a simulated shopping task. Given that the vast majority of studies on attitudes and behavior in the environmental domain use self-report measures of behavior, this may mean that we are generating research findings that could be making policy makers overly complacent about our readiness for actual behavior change. Implicit attitudes were not significantly associated with either measure in terms of group comparisons, but those with a strong positive implicit attitude towards low carbon did choose more low carbon items, but only under time pressure. The opposite trend was found for explicit attitudes – this increased only when participants were not under time pressure. These results suggest that Kahneman’s hypothesis about contrasting systems of human cognition might be highly relevant to the domain of climate change and behavioral adaptation.

Keywords: implicit attitudes; explicit attitudes; low carbon consumer choice; carbon footprint; brand

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Published Online: 2019-01-25
Published in Print: 2019-03-05

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2017-0138
Keywords for this article
implicit attitudes; explicit attitudes; low carbon consumer choice; carbon footprint; brand

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Articles
  3. Spatializing food: Signs, spaces, and the legal (dis-)composition of what we eat
  4. A review of the comparative study of Mo Yan and Faulkner in China
  5. Expounding knowledge through explanations: Generic types and rhetorical-relational patterns
  6. A semiosic translation of the term “Bild” in both the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and The Philosophical Investigations
  7. Talking green and acting green are two different things: An experimental investigation of the relationship between implicit and explicit attitudes and low carbon consumer choice
  8. De l’explosion dans Le Transperceneige de Joon-ho Bong
  9. Using semantic tagging to examine the American Dream and the Chinese Dream
  10. Faith in fakes: Secrets, lies, and conspiracies in Umberto Eco’s writings
  11. The semiotics of breast cancer: Signs, symptoms, and sales
  12. Finite semiotics: Recovery functions, semioformation, and the hyperreal
  13. The urgency of engaging with oddities and ambiguities: Reciprocity and cooperation visited as semio-aesthetic notions in bridging nature and culture
  14. Concepts of narrative, founding violence, and multiculturalism in the Americas: Greimas, Girard, and Kymlicka
  15. Language mediated mentalization: A proposed model
  16. Immanuel Kant on the philosophy of communicology: The tropic logic of rhetoric and semiotics
  17. Voice and bodily deixis as manifestation of performativity in written texts
  18. Review Articles
  19. Review of The semiotics of emoji: The rise of visual language in the age of the Internet
  20. The semiotics of intuition, care, and esotericism in education
  21. Book Review
  22. Fiction as semiotics
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