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resources, revealed that conventional plastic bags had the lowest impact in eight of the nine studied categories and that this impact largely depended on the number of times a bag was reused (Edwards and Fry 2011). Given the com- plexity of objective assessment of environmental friendli- ness, we propose that consumers will rely on simplified decision-making and use heuristics in their judgments of environmental friendliness of packaging. These heuristics could be based on consumers’ beliefs about packaging materials, which we discuss next. Paper and Plastic Packaging Beliefs We propose that consumers’ personal experience and beliefs, as well as exposure to external cues, will facilitate a belief that paper is relatively good for the environment, while plastic is relatively bad, what we refer to as “paper ¼ good, plastic ¼ bad” belief. Personal Experience and Beliefs. First, people form the “paper ¼ good, plastic ¼ bad” belief through repeated sensory experience with paper and plastic. Blind-test data suggest that people find the touch of paper to be more pleasant than that of plastic (Klo¨cker et al. 2012). Similar to the formation of implicit brand attitudes based on past preferences, repeated sensory experiences may result in more positive associations for paper and more negative associations for plastic (Maison, Greenwald, and Bruin 2004). Second, “paper ¼ good, plastic ¼ bad” belief may be formed based on an intuition that paper is more natural and derived from trees, while plastic is more artificial. Driven by the “natural is better” heuristic (Hagen 2021; Meier, Dillard, and Lappas 2019), consumers can come to perceive “natural” paper as good and “unnatural” plastic as bad. At the same time, plastic packaging, a material causing less environmental harm at the production stage and argu- ably more harm during disposal (Edwards and Fry 2011), may be seen as substantially worse for the environment because of people’s innate tendency to perceive later-timed events as more consequential. For example, a basketball player scoring a 2-point basket at the 40th minute of a 40 minute game is seen as contributing more to the outcome of the game compared to a player scoring a basket at the 7th minute (Ziano and Pandelaere 2022). Similarly, prod- ucts causing environmental harm first and benefits later (e.g., electric car made in a conventional way, but produc- ing no emissions while driven) are seen as having more positive environmental impact than products producing environmental benefits first and causing harm later (e.g., gasoline car made with recycled materials that emits gas while driven; Hur et al. 2021). Further attesting to the idea that plastic may be seen as more environmentally harmful than paper because of its environmental footprint during disposal, in-depth interview
as more environmentally friendly than plastic-only packag- ing. Our theorizing relies on three core propositions. First, we propose that objective and subjective evaluations of the environmental friendliness of product packaging may diverge. Second, we propose that in their subjective evalu- ations of the environmental friendliness of product packag- ing, consumers will rely on a “paper ¼ good, plastic ¼ bad” belief. Finally, we propose that consumers will use the “good paper-to-bad plastic” proportion, as opposed to the total amount of product packaging, to judge packaging environmental friendliness. Next, we discuss the research pertinent to these three propositions and build our specific predictions.
Objective and Perceived Environmental Friendliness
Marketing and social psychology research outlines sev- eral ways to make consumer behaviors more sustainable— from making environmentally friendly product choices more socially desirable, to rewarding these choices with monetary incentives, to discouraging environmentally unfriendly ones by anticipated guilt (White, Habib, and Hardisty 2019). Importantly, the research also indicates that often consumers cannot objectively assess the environ- mental footprint of different products, meaning that their understanding of what constitutes a sustainable or environ- mentally friendly product choice may be limited or incor- rect. For instance, Gershoff and Frels (2015) demonstrate that products with identical environmental benefits are judged differently, depending on whether the green bene- fits stem from more versus less central product attributes. As such, holding the overall amount of recycled materials in a product constant, consumers are more likely to view a waffle maker (that can also make paninis) as more environ- mentally friendly when its waffle plates are made of 90% recycled aluminum, compared to when its panini plates are. In another study attesting to the subjective nature of consumers’ environmental friendliness perceptions, Reid et al. (2010) show that product designs that have fewer abrupt line changes are perceived as inspired by nature and, consequently, are erroneously seen as more environ- mentally friendly. While this prior research focuses on the products’ envi- ronmental friendliness, it has bearing on the products’ packaging as well. Similar to judgments of product envi- ronmental friendliness, objective evaluations of packaging environmental friendliness require that consumers gather and integrate large amounts of information about the rela- tive environmental footprint of different packaging materi- als. To illustrate, the Environment Agency of England and Whales conducted a life-cycle assessment of different supermarket carrier bags. The assessment across nine envi- ronmental impact categories, such as the global warming potential and contribution to depletion of environmental
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