Explaining Sustainable Consumption: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis: An Abstract

International communities are in general agreement that fulfilling environmental goals for a sustainable future is only possible with the reduction of consumptions’ detrimental effects. This, however, requires a deep understanding of the factors affecting environmentally significant consumer behaviors, such as buying ecologically friendly products, recycling, using household energy vigilantly, or driving less frequently. In recent years, we see an increasing number of studies in behavioral research looking at environmental attitudes, values, and behavior that try to understand relationships with different variables from different theoretical perspectives. These studies, however, largely lack an overarching perspective that considers variety of theories and behaviors with a comparative approach. As such, this study tries to fill this gap by exploring the functioning of consumer behavior in the environmental domain with a comparative approach, which is needed to uncover every aspect of the forces behind environmentally significant behaviors of consumers. Mainly, this study examines the explanatory power of the three theories, Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), Value-Belief-Norm (VBN), and Theory on Affect (TA), which focus on gain motives, moral concerns, and hedonic motives, respectively, and compares with each other for three different stages of consumption, namely, purchase, usage, and post-use behaviors.