Does greenwashing dim green actions? Examining how greenwashing impacts consumers’ pro-environmental intentions
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Greenwashing has become increasingly prevalent in contemporary business practices. Despite this rise, there remains a notable gap in academic research regarding how customers’ perceptions of greenwashing influence their pro-environmental intentions beyond mere green purchasing. This study aims to bridge this gap by drawing psychological inferences to understand how perceived greenwashing influences customers’ pro-environmental intentions. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a scenario-based, cross-sectional research design to explore the effects of perceived greenwashing. Data were collected from a micro-networking website, with a total of 360 Indian consumers participating in the study. The analysis was conducted using partial least squares – structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to assess the relationships posited in the research. Findings The analysis revealed that greenwashing significantly impacts perceived deceptiveness and consumer cynicism, both, in turn, influencing perceived ineffectiveness. This perceived ineffectiveness then negatively affects pro-environmental intentions, demonstrating how greenwashing undermines consumers’ willingness to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors. In addition, the study provides valuable insights into how different types of greenwashing affect these relationships. Practical implications The study offers critical implications for mitigating the negative impact of greenwashing on pro-environmental intentions, which are challenging to foster. Originality/value Existing literature primarily concentrates on the impacts of greenwashing on brands or customers’ switching and continuation intentions. This pioneering study introduces a unique perspective by exploring the impact of greenwashing on customers’ pro-environmental intentions in their everyday lives. Specifically, it investigates whether unethical practices by a brand can influence consumers’ lifestyles beyond the adverse effects these practices may have on the brand itself. This approach provides a deeper understanding of how greenwashing can affect consumer behavior in a broader context, offering significant insights into the intersection of corporate ethics and individual environmental actions.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it