Simple and Painless? The Limitations of Spillover in Environmental Campaigning

By John Th⊘gersen, T. Crompton. 2009

574 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The comfortable perception that global environmental challenges can be met through marginal lifestyle changes no longer bears scrutiny. The cumulative impact of large numbers of individuals making marginal improvements in their environmental impact will be a marginal collective improvement in environmental impact. Yet, we live at a time when we need urgent and ambitious changes. An appeal to environmental imperatives is more likely to lead to spillover into other pro-environmental behaviours than an appeal to financial self-interest or social status.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b7c445486156108b5dbdb04c6f07ea2721bf5e6

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Citations in the corpus

Recycling Gone Bad: When the Option to Recycle Increases Resource Consumption (2013, background): “In addition, our study can also be compared to the notions of positive and negative “spillover” in environmentally responsible behavior (Thøgersen & Crompton, 2009).”
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve? (2021, unknown): “…different lifestyles even within similar social groups and geographic regions (not least those with high income versus those without) (2, 129)—and yet, there has so far been a pervasive failure to direct mitigation efforts toward high emitters and emission-intensive practices (156, 158, 162).”
Moral licensing, moral cleansing and pro-environmental behaviour: The moderating role of pro-environmental attitudes (2019, background): “Furthermore, Crompton and Thøgersen (2009) argued that a licensing effect is more likely to be found where behaviours are not based on pro-environmental attitudes and values.”
A comparative study of relative roles and sequences of cognitive and affective attitudes on tourists’ pro-environmental behavioral intention (2020, background): “For example, the promotion of painless PEBs does not necessarily lead to the adoption of other significant yet difficult ones (Thøgersen & Crompton, 2009).”
An Integrated Framework for Encouraging Pro-environmental Behaviour: The role of values, situational factors and goals (2014, background): “First, by solely targeting hedonic and gain goals, people may adopt the view that it is only sensible and necessary to act pro-environmentally when it is convenient or financially interesting to do so (Thøgersen & Crompton, 2009), thereby undermining the influence of normative goals.”
Spillover effects in environmental behaviors, across time and context: a review and research agenda (2017, background): “Therefore, if cognitive dissonance processes are driving the positive behavioral spillover effect, people may change their attitudes instead of adjusting the second behavior to the first (Thøgersen and Crompton 2009).”
Low carbon lifestyles: A framework to structure consumption strategies and options to reduce carbon footprints (2016, background): “It is subject of debate whether those changes have to be incremental, practical and ﬁ t within peoples' current lifestyles or whether more fundamental and radical changes are needed (Jackson, 2011; Lorek, 2009; Thøgersen and Crompton, 2009).”
For better or for worse? Empirical evidence of moral licensing in a behavioral energy conservation campaign (2013, background): “’’ The underlying idea of this positive spillover of environmental behavior is that the ‘‘adoption of a particular behavior increases the motivation for an individual to adopt other, related behaviors’’ (Thøgersen and Crompton, 2009), based on environmental values that foster feelings of moral oblig”
Understanding the inherent complexity of sustainable consumption: A social cognitive framework (2013, background): “For example, research into spillover effects show how pro-environmental behavior in one area has the potential to leak into, or spill over, into another area (Thøgersen & Crompton, 2009; Verplanken, Aarts, & Van Knippenberg, 1997).”
Nudging sustainable consumption: The use of descriptive norms to promote a minority behavior in a realistic online shopping environment (2015, background): “…numbers of individuals making marginal improvements in their environmental impact will be amarginal collective improvement in environmental impact” (Thøgersen & Crompton, 2009), the normbased approach could prove to be very useful in the long term, as a year-on-year leverage effect may…”