关键词: 可持续消费, 社会主体, 心理需求, 影响机制

Abstract: As global developmental challenges such as climate disasters, resource scarcity, and environmental pollution intensify, major economies worldwide have urged the public to adopt sustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns. However, marketing practitioners and researchers have observed a pronounced gap between consumers’ positive attitudes toward sustainable consumption and their lagging consumption behavior. To better understand how to bridge this attitude-behavior gap, extensive research has been conducted.
From an individual-level perspective, previous research has explored the influence of consumers’ individual characteristics and value-belief systems on sustainable consumption and has sought either to identify true sustainable consumers within the population or to nudge consumers’ psychological mechanisms toward sustainability through specific contextual settings and marketing strategies, thereby transforming general consumers into sustainable consumers. Nonetheless, studies have shown that individual-level interventions often yield limited effects and fail to persist over time, ultimately unable to eliminate the attitude-behavior gap.
Recent research recognizes that sustainable consumption is not merely an individual-level choice but also the result of social interactions between consumers and multiple actors in their social networks. These studies have systematically examined how social actors at the individual, group, and organizational levels influence consumers’ sustainable consumption decisions. Findings indicate that multiple social actors can shape social beliefs regarding sustainable consumption through emotional connections, behavioral modeling, group norms, marketing strategies, and policy constraints, thereby facilitating or hindering the translation of sustainable attitudes into consumption behavior.
Drawing on self-determination theory, this study develops a framework of the mechanisms and effects of multiple social actors’ influence on sustainable consumption. The framework proposes that the translation of consumers’ positive attitudes toward sustainable consumption into sustained behavior is subject to complex influences from multiple social actors. Specifically, depending on the types and degrees of basic psychological need satisfaction or frustration, social actors at the individual, group, and organizational levels can facilitate or hinder the internalization of motivation at different levels, thereby producing differential effects on the persistence of sustainable consumption behavior and narrowing or widening the sustainable consumption attitude-behavior gap.

Key words: sustainable consumption, social agent, psychological need, influence mechanism