Cognitive biases effects in sustainability perception : Exploring the negative footprint illusion through an experimental study

Sammanfattning

In recent decades climate change has become an increasingly growing concern globally and is now considered to be one of the greatest challenges for today's society. This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate on sustainable energy consumption by examining the challenge on electricity demand from a psychological perspective. With a focus on how cognitive processes shape consumer perception and judgments in response to environmental information, specifically the negative footprint illusion and similar effect. In this study three online experiment were conducted. The study addressed the gaps in the existing literature by testing whether the negative footprint illusion can be demonstrated in a concrete environmental judgment task involving energy labels where participants will estimate the amount of kWh for electronic products. In all three experiments, the participants estimated the electricity consumption (kWh) of electronic products with different energy labels. The findings from Experiment 1 showed no signs of a negative footprint illusion while the findings from Experiment 2 and 3 indicated that a zero footprint illusion occurred. In Experiment 1 the opposite results were shown between the conditions than expected and in Experiment 2 and 3 the results suggest a zero footprint illusion rather than a difference between the conditions. The findings of this study indicate that biased thinking and a zero footprint illusion can be triggered by priming the participants into a more qualitative mindset over a quantitative one and transform the absolute scale to a simpler relative one. Further we suggest that contextual factors such as the question posed and the stimulus material presented impact how biased estimations people make. We suggest further research on the subject to get a deeper understanding of under which contexts and situations the negative footprint illusion and similar effects occur.