Pro-Environmental Behavior and Rational Consumer Choice

Pro-Environmental Behavior and Rational Consumer Choice 22
The interaction with materialism is insignificant in this case. Choice distortions with
respect to water conservation thus affect materialists and non-materialists alike. Different
weights placed on the level of consumption do not appear to have an effect on the choice
with respect to water conservation.
In addition to the materialism proxy mentioned above, we checked these results using
another indicator which takes the value 1 if “a good income” is considered the most
important feature of a job vis a vis several alternatives (“a safe job with no risk”, “working
with people you like”, “doing an important job” and “do something for community”). This
attitude indicator is also negatively associated with life satisfaction (as is Materialism) and
its interaction with green products has a positive (though insignificant) coefficient.
4.4 Distorted Choice and Cognitive Conditions
The accuracy of affective forecasting may depend on cognitive conditions such as general
education or familiarity with the choices under consideration. To address this issue, we
consider life satisfaction regressions which include interactions of pro-environmental
behaviors with measures of education levels and of familiarity with pro-environmental
behavior.
Table 4 presents the results with respect to levels of general education. The coefficient
values shown in the line ‘behavior’ refer to the reference group of people with no formal
education, whereas the coefficients in the lines containing the interactions measure
differences from that reference group. For all three behaviors, the coefficients for the
reference group are considerably larger than in the counterpart regressions from Table 2.
People without formal education are thus particularly liable to committing mistakes in their
environmentally relevant choices. The coefficients on the behavior-education interactions
are always negative, which means that the mistakes are smaller in better educated people.
Having secondary education reduces mistakes significantly and to a considerable extent.
Having university education reduces the mistakes even further. In the case of green
products, mistakes are 80 percent smaller in people with university education relative to
the reference group.