关键词: 绿色消费, 自我建构, 道德补偿, 信号表征

Abstract:

Green consumption is not only an individual’s consumption habit, but also an important social issue closely related to the future development of the society. Despite the continuous efforts from the marketers and governments, an issue that has received much attention from marketers and scholars is the gap between the purchase intentions for these products and the actual purchases of them. To better understand how to minimize this intention-behavior gap, research in marketing and social psychology has extensively focused on the drivers of green consumption.

Previous research on green consumption motivation was based on the biophilia hypothesis, which demonstrated that protecting the natural environment was the basic value orientation and psychological motivation. However, consumption choice is not made in vacuum, but rather an act of meaning and often conveys information about the consumer, such as their preference, and social standing. In this vein, green product choices express not only price and quality preference, but also consumers’ values and social identity. Recent research has also illustrated that it is not environmental protection itself that determines whether people engage in green consumption, but the self-concept associated with it. Hence, it is vital to differentiate the various psychological motivations ’underlying the green consumption.

Compared to general consumption behavior, green consumption is altruistic and high cost, allowing individuals to construct their moral self and social self through green choices. Based on moral regulation theory and high cost signal theory, we propose that people have dual psychological routes when engaging in green consumption—moral self-construal and social self-construal. Specifically, Consumers with moral self-construal utilize green consumption as a way to compensate to eliminate the moral dissonance caused by the contradiction between reality and ideal moral self. They are influenced by several psychological factors related to morality such as moral emotions, moral consciousness, and moral identity. Green consumers with social self-construal make green choices to satisfy the symbolic representation motivation, such as status, power, reputation, and wealth characteristics. In this manner, they are also influenced by some psychological factors related to status and power such as status seeking, sense of power, and face awareness.

Furthermore, we argue that individuals adjust and integrate their self-constructed psychological paths in dynamic consumption scenarios, leading to differentiated green consumption intentions and behavioral consequences. Based on the dual path model, consumers can flexibly switch between the dual paths according to consumption scenarios, product types, advertising information, and other situational factors. They can also simultaneously promote the dual motivation of moral and social self-construal in a single consumption scenario. At the same time, the green consumption behavior model shaped by the dual psychological dynamic path can also reshape consumers’ green consumption motivation and have spillover effects on subsequent consumption behavior.

To summarize, this research enhances our understanding of the different roles of intrapersonal and interpersonal factors that influence green consumption in a comprehensive and dynamic perspective. More generally, our findings also add to a growing body of research pointing to a link between identity and consumers’ tendency to engage in green consumption behavior.

Key words: green consumption, self-construal, moral compensation, symbolic signal