An Empirical Study On The Influence Factorsof Consumer’s Low-carbon Consumption Behavior

In the process of developing low-carbon economy, it is more emphasized on how to promote company’s environmental concept and energy-saving technology, but ignored the role of lowcarbon consumer who are the end part of economy chain. Despite of many advertising persuasion that aims to teach people with positive low-carbon attitude, people found it’s hard to transform the action.Scholars used to focus only on reasonable factors in the past study, believing that behavior is decided by reasonable factors like attitude and is controlled by conscious. However, as for the low-carbon consumption behavior that happens with high frequency, when the behavior is repeated and when this brings satisfaction(i.e., reduce consideration, bring adept), the behavior will transform into a habit, which is an automatic context-response and without consciousness. Therefore, this paper studies the factors that influence consumer’s low-carbon consumption behavior is the mechanism between the factors.According to Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior, Triandis’ Theory of Interpersonal Behavior, and ABC Theory, the study differentiate the factors into two type, one is reasonable factors, which are the main variables from the Theory of Planned Behavior, and the other is unreasonable factors which is habit. Besides, the context factor is included. Based on the analysis, a mediation moderated model is been established.According to the conceptual model, this paper select recycling behavior as the case, and pre-after test and control group as the field experiment design method. The experiment selected the officers of an office building in Xi’an as the sample, divided into groups and implement contextual manipulation. The experiment consist with two parts, the first part is survey on the recycling’s attitude, social norm, perceived behavior control, behavior intention and habit. The second part is recycling behavior measure in the field, and implemented pre and after the manipulation.The research result indicates that low-carbon consumption behavior is influenced by both reasonable and unreasonable factors. Among these, behavior intention mediate the relationship between reasonable factors: attitude, social norm, perceived behavior control, and behavior. While habit as unreasonable factor serves as quasi-moderator in the relationship between behavior intention and behavior. Besides, external context factor affect the role of habit and convenient context condition will promote low-carbon consumption behavior.At last, this paper’s research result will help to better understand the features of consumer’s lowcarbon consumption behavior and will help relevant government to enact efficient guiding policies.