Abstract

As individuals become more aware and concerned about their own contribution to global climate change, empowering consumers to make informed decisions that are beneficial to the environment is of chief importance. This study tests how literacy interventions can be used to empower and increase people’s ability to identify greenwashing as a defense against for-profit organizations who seek to elevate the attractiveness of their products using deceptive appeals. Relying on work from the communications and education disciplines, this work seeks to inform best practices for designing simple greenwashing literacy interventions. Using a between-subjects experiment (N = 476), we found that vividness was rated the highest in a literacy intervention that embedded both textual quotes and image exemplars, which increased literacy outcomes. Similarly, the quote-only condition fully mediated the relationship between the intervention and literacy outcomes. Neither cognitive load nor the availability heuristic significantly mediated the intervention and literacy outcomes. This research offers important theoretical and practical implications for using exemplars as educational tools on social media.

摘要

随着个人越来越意识到并关注自己对全球气候变化的贡献，让消费者能够做出有利于环境的明智决策变得至关重要。这项研究测试了如何利用扫盲干预来增强人们的能力，并增强人们将漂绿识别为一种防御，以防止营利性组织使用欺骗性诉求来提高其产品的吸引力。依靠传播和教育学科的工作，这项工作旨在为设计简单的漂绿扫盲干预措施的最佳实践提供信息。使用受试者间实验 ( N = 476），我们发现在嵌入文本引用和图像示例的识字干预中，生动性被评为最高，这增加了识字结果。同样，仅引用条件完全调节了干预和识字结果之间的关系。认知负荷和可用性启发法都没有显着调节干预和识字结果。这项研究为使用范例作为社交媒体上的教育工具提供了重要的理论和实践意义。