Encouraging Sustainable Behavior

Increasingly it is being recognized that consumer behavior may be a key trigger in the march toward sustainable development. Several lines of psychological theory and approaches have been developed relatively independently, each of which may provide major implications and action points on how consumers might be moved toward more sustainable behavior. This book is the first that brings together this variety of perspectives and theoretical angles around the common ambition of sustainable development. The contributors are all leading social scientists in the field of consumer behavior who met the challenge to sketch out their theoretical perspectives, but also to go beyond their normal theorizing and think out of the box in order to show how these theoretical perspectives might be made actionable in terms of key managerial and policy perspectives toward sustainable development. The result is a book that shows a wealth of information and approaches the question of how to encourage sustainable behavior from a myriad of divergent perspectives.This should stimulate scientists and policy-makers alike to find similarities, differences, and synergies between state-of-the-art psychological thinking about how to most effectively stimulate sustainable consumer behavior.

Hans C. M. van Trijp holds the Chair of Marketing and Consumer Behavior at Wageningen University and is part-time Lead Scientist in Consumer Behavior at Unilever R&D in the Netherlands. His scientific work focuses primarily on the extent to which consumer behavior theory can be exploited to inform marketing strategies to enhance sustainable consumer behavior. He was the Scientific Director within the Dutch innovation program Transforum in the area of mobilizing consumer demand for sustainable products and services. He has published extensively in the marketing, consumer psychology, and food domains. He is a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Research in Marketing and Food Quality and Preference and chairs the Food and Consumer working group within the European Technology Platform Food for Life with the aim to leverage the research agendas between industry and governments across Europe.

"Environmental sustainability is one of the most critical issues of our time. This book offers insights from behavioral science that can help us to understand how we got into this predicament, and what strategies can help us to achieve a more sustainable future. This is an important and timely book." -Wesley Schultz, Ph.D., California State University San Marcos "This book is a highly inspiring collection of papers on the issue why people may not act in a sustainable way, even though they acknowledge the importance of doing so. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from psychology and adjacent social science disciplines, it is convincingly shown why we cannot expect people to behave in a sustainable way just because we tell them to." -Klaus G. Grunert, Ph.D., Aarhus University, Denmark