Sustainable Consumption in a Trap: Attitude-Behavior Gap and Its Rationalization

Abstract

The main finding which derives from the research on sustainable consumption discloses that although consumers’ attitudes toward the concept of sustainability are positive, individuals relatively rarely follow sustainability rules in their daily life. This phenomenon called attitude-behavior gap has not been clearly explained. Some authors, relying on Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior, seek to clarify it through the lens of rationalization techniques. The objective of this article is to describe the phenomenon of attitude-behavior gap as well as to explain the techniques of rationalization and identify them on the example of Polish consumers. This goal is achieved by presenting the results of literature analysis and introducing selected outcomes of qualitative field research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.