Reflective-Impulsive Green Buying: Psychological Mechanism and Role of Product Information

Sustainable consumption became an inalienable part of our life. Building on it, a large share of consumer behavior research is focused on green buying as a part of sustainable consumption. Most existing literature considers sustainable actions and green buying as conscious and planned processes. However, there is recent evidence that green buying may be at the same time impulsive. Although the interest of researchers in impulsive buying in sustainable settings grows dramatically nowadays, prior studies evaluate factors affecting impulsive buying of green products (i.e., buyer-seller personality similarity or corporate social responsibility practices) rather than the psychological mechanism behind it. Drawing on the Reflective-Impulsive Model, we address this gap and, using an experimental approach, investigate how the amount of product information shapes the impulsive and reflective decision-making process of green buying. The current paper is a research-in-progress, and it presents preliminary results of data collection and hypotheses testing.