Moral Identity And Green Consumption:the Mediation Effect Of Environmental Protection Self-accountability

Environmental issues such as air pollution, global warming and energy crisis become severe. People pay more and more attention to environmental protection and sustanibility which relate to the survival and development of human beings. Consumers play an important role in environmental protection activities. On one hand, consumption behaviors of consumers have direct impact on environment, on the other hand, consumers’environmental concern, consumers’need of green products, consumers’ support to coporations’ environmental protection behaviors, and consumers’ boycott to coporations’ environmental harm behaviors drive coporations to the direction of environmental protection, and thus consumers have indirect impact on environment through corporations.However, green consumption just spring up, and has not deeply rooted in everyone’s mind in China. Many studies indicate even consumers who have definitely supportive attitude toward green consumption seldom turn this supportive attitude into positive behavior. It is a challenging task to let consumers behave in an environmentally responsible manner. That’s because the beneficits of environmental protection are not consumers themselves, but the society, other consumers, or the planet. Consumers promote the society’s, other-oriented benefits while incur costs to themselves. As a result, it is important for marketers to figure out how to promote consumers’green consumption.Though, there have been some domestic and international studies relating to green consumption, and some progress has been made in this area, there are many shortcomings in this research area and this provides opportunities for further study. First of all, previous studies are disperse and scattering, and lack an integrated model. Secondlly, studies about green consumption’s psychological mechanism are not deep enough. Thirdly, some variables which might have impact on green consumption potentially have not been paid attention. Therefore, this study will investigate the relationship between moral identity and green consumption and the mediation effect of environmental protection self-accountability, and find some virables which might moderate these three variables.Moral identity is a self-conception organized around a set of moral traits, is a mental representation about his/her moral traits an individual possesses, is a moral self-cognitive schema, and represents a person’s associative cognitive network of related moral traits, feelings and behaviors. The theory of moral identity indicates when people’s moral self-schemas are long-term and temporarily accessible in memory, people will have stronger other-benefits inclination. Green consumption is other-benefits in nature. Accordingly, this research proposes that moral identity has a positive effect on consumers’green consumption and environmental protection self-accountability which reveals people’s desire to live up to their environmental protection self-standards mediates the relationship betwwen moral identity and consumers’green consumption. This research verifies the hypothesis above through Study One.This research divides virables that moderate the relationship between moral identity and consumers’green consumption inclination into two parts. One part virables moderate the mediation effect of environmental protection self-accountability. One part virables are moderators which are mediated by environmental protection self-accountability. On these grounds, this study proposes two theoretical frameworks, and tests through experiments. Variables that moderate the relationship between moral identity and consumers’green consumption inclination and moderate the mediation effect of environmental protection self-accountability are product appeal, information reliability of products’environmental protection claims, and products’ environmental protection efficacy. The results from study Two to study Four rveal:1)when green products’promotion use self-benefit appeal, moral identity doesn’t affect consumers’green consumption inclination and environmental protection self-accountability doesn’t mediate the relationship between moral identity and consumers’green consumption inclination, while, when green products’promotion use other-benefit appeal, moral identity has a positive effect on consumers’green consumption inclination and environmental protection self-accountability mediate the relationship between moral identity and consumers’green consumption inclination;2) when consumers believe corporations’environmental protection claims on products have lower information reliability, moral identity has a negative effect on consumers’ green consumption inclination and environmental protection self-accountability doesn’t mediate the relationship between moral identity and consumers’ green consumption inclination, while, when consumers believe corporations’ environmental protection claims on products have higher information reliability, moral identity has a positive effect on consumers’green consumption inclination and environmental protection self-accountability mediate the relationship between moral identity and consumers’ green consumption inclination;3) when products’environmental protection efficacy is lower, moral identity doesn’t affect consumers’ green consumption inclination and environmental protection self-accountability doesn’t mediate the relationship between moral identity and consumers’ green consumption inclination, while, products’ environmental protection efficacy is higher, moral identity has a positive effect on consumers’green consumption inclination and environmental protection self-accountability mediate the relationship between moral identity and consumers’ green consumption inclination.Variables that moderate the relationship between moral identity and consumers’ green consumption inclination and being moderators which are mediated by environmental protection self-accountability include impression management motive, norm belief, product type, and construal level. The results from Study Five to Study Nine reveal:1)when consumers have stronger impression motive, moral identity doesn’t affect consumers’ green consumption inclination, while, when consumers don’t have strong impression motive, moral identity has a positive effect on consumers’ green consumption inclination, and environmental protection self-accountability mediate the moderation effect of impression motive on the relationship between moral identity and consumers’green consumption inclination;2) when consumers believe environmental protection conform to social norm, impression motive moderate the relationship between moral identity and consumers’ green consumption inclination, while, when consumers believe environmental protection doesn’t conform to social norm, impression motive doesn’t moderate the relationship between moral identity and consumers’green consumption inclination, and environmental protection self-accountability mediate the remoderation effect of consumers’norm belief on the moderation effect of impression motive;3) when green products are indulgence, moral identity doesn’t affect consumers’ green consumption inclination, while, when products are necessities, moral identity has a positive effect on consumers’green consumption inclination, and environmental protection self-accountability mediate the moderation effect of product type on the relationship between moral identity and consumers’green consumption inclination;4) when consumers are in high construal level, moral identity doesn’t affect consumers’ green consumption inclination, while, when consumers are in low construal level, moral identity has a positive effect on consumers’green consumption inclination, and environmental protection self-accountability mediate the moderation effect of construal level on the relationship between moral identity and consumers’green consumption inclination.This study investigates the relationship between moral identity and green consumption, the mediation effect of environmental protection self-accountability, and the variables moderate the relationships between these three variables. This study makes up for the shotcomings of previous studies which lack integrated model of green consumption and lack psychological mechanism of green consumption, and find out new variables to promote consumers’green consumption. This study provides new insight to how to guide consumers to be engaged in green consumption.