Tate K , Stewart A & Daly M ( 2014 ) Influencing green behaviour through environmental goal - priming : The mediating role of automatic evaluation

Psychology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. Highlights • We examined the evaluative and behavioural effects of environmental goal-priming. • Environmental goal-relevant stimuli were loose versus packaged products. • Environmental goal-priming influenced automatic evaluation. • Environmental goal-priming increased choices of loose products. • Automatic evaluation change mediated the observed behaviour change. Abstract (word count 149) Understanding how pro-environmental messages may influence behaviour is key to promoting sustainable consumer choice. Research suggests that people automatically evaluate objects as a function of their instrumentality to satisfying active goals. We hypothesized that priming an environmental-protection goal through exposure to a pro-environmental message would produce more positive automatic evaluations and lead people to make the pro-environmental choice of selecting loose rather than packaged products in a hypothetical choice task. As predicted, those primed with an environmental-protection goal automatically evaluated loose products more positively and selected more loose consumer products than a control group. Increased implicit positivity towards loose products mediated the observed behaviour change. Crucially, the effect of environmental goal priming on choices or implicit attitudes towards packaging was not contingent on existing environmental attitudes. Our findings suggest that pro-environmental messages could induce more environmentally friendly consumer choice by leading people to evaluate readily available goal-relevant stimuli positively.