Do the Powerful Conserve? Understanding the Role of Power in Sustainable Consumption Intentions: An Abstract

According to the United Nations, as the world population approaches 10 billion people by the year 2050, triple the amount of natural resources that are available today would be required to sustain existing lifestyles (https://​www.​un.​org/​sustainabledevel​opment/​sustainable-consumption-production/​). Despite the importance of power in the context of consumption behavior, its impact has not been explored in the context of socially responsible consumption. Furthermore, the literature on the effect of power on self-serving vs. pro-social behaviors have been mixed (Righetti et al. 2015). As such, the objective of the present research is to explore the multifaceted role that power may play in the context of sustainable consumption behavior. Additionally, this study aims to examine the role of moral identity; a critical construct known to interact with power in shaping self-serving vs. pro-social behavior. Moral identity is defined as the degree to which an individual’s morality is a central component of his/her self-concept (DeCelles et al. 2012).

Respondents were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk to complete an experiment. They were first asked to complete a power manipulation (Galinsky et al. 2003), followed by a power manipulation check. Half of the respondents were randomly assigned to a high power condition, while half of the respondents were exposed to a low power condition. Next, they were exposed to a scenario that describing a hypothetical scenario in which they were planning to buy a water bottle and were told that they came across an environmentally friendly bottle. This was followed by a 4 item measure of purchase intention (Edinger-Schons et al. 2018), a measure of sustainable consumption attitude (Webb et al. 2008) and finally a measure of moral identity (Aquino and Reed 2002). 109 responses were received. 3 respondents were excluded resulting in 106 usable responses.

The results support that moral identity has a positive impact on purchase intention and that power had a marginally significant and negative impact on purchase intention. The results also support a three-way interaction between power, moral identity and attitude toward sustainable consumption. The effect of attitude toward sustainable consumption on purchase intention, for low moral identity consumers is the same regardless of the level of power. However, the results, show that for high moral identity consumers, the positive effect of attitude on purchase intention exists only when power is high.