Green default nudges are considered as an instrument to promote sustainable consumption decisions. The environmental attitude and environmental awareness of consumers is also used repeatedly to predict sustainable behavior.
For the interaction of these two factors (defaults and attitude) ConPolicy project manager Dr. Max Vetter and Dr. Oliver Taube from the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories now published an experimental study. They were able to show that the actual consumption decisions in a simulated shopping experiment were independently determined by the default and the environmental attitudes of the participants, while the decision to accept a green default was influenced by the environmental attitude.
The study, entitled "How green defaults promote environmentally friendly decisions: attitude-conditional default acceptance and attitude-unconditional effects on actual choices" has been published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology and is available here.