Seeking Similarities Or Reserving Differences: A Study On Green Consumption From The Perspective Of Social Comparison

The study finds that green consumption is the tradeoff that consumers are forced to make between collective interests and personal interests. In reality, however, consumers think that green consumption is a kind of fashion, and they tend to use herd mentality to chose green consumption, or in order to show their uniqueness that almost not affected by the influence of the negative features such as high price of green products. Why will consumers coexist strong personality and obvious herd mentality? This contradiction has not caused enough attentions. More enterprises realized the importance and necessity of green consumption. Promote and comply with the demand of green consumption is not only an important means to enhance the competitiveness of enterprises, but also the key to solve the environmental crisis. Green consumption behavior research become one of the important and lasting concern topic at present.Green consumption behavior is a kind of pro-social behavior. Social exchange theory points out that social comparison has significant effects on prosocial behavior. The study sorts out literatures and it analyzes some existing research limitations. Then built on the perspective of social comparison, this paper explores the relationship between social comparison orientation and green consumption, and examines the mediating effects of in-group identification and the moderating effects of face consciousness, thereby building the conceptual model of this study. Taken data descriptive analysis to verify the hypotheses, it suggests the following conclusions:(1) Social comparison orientation has significant positive effects on green consumption and in-group identification.(2) In-group identification mediates partly the relationship between social comparison orientation and green consumption.(3) Face consciousness has significant positive moderating effects on the relationship between in-group identification and green consumption on one hand, and on the other hand, it has positive moderating effects on in-group identification’ s mediatorial role.