Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (13 page)

much more pro-low carbon in their explicit measure than in their implicit measure. This was the first hint in my data that some people might like to exaggerate their green credentials. They would report, when asked, that they were pro-low carbon products, and that, of course, they cared about the environment. The IAT, however, revealed something different. I was surprised to find (for all kinds of reasons) that I was actually one of them.

I need to change tack now, to show the results of a very different sort of psychology experiment, one that was extremely time-consuming and laborious to carry out, as we now started to monitor the unconscious eye movements of individuals looking at packaging. (Luckily I had a second dedicated research assistant, Laura McGuire, to take the lead on this.) Why weren’t people buying the low-carbon-footprint products given how positive their underlying attitudes were? I needed to track unconscious eye movements to determine what the brain actually sees when it looks at a product, to see whether this might hold a clue (perhaps they simply never noticed the carbon footprint information). This could prove to be illuminating in many ways. Thousands of minute dots on a computer screen had to be individually coded, but it was essential to finding out what is going on at the most basic level of human perception when people glance at products.

So how does this fit in with the bigger issues? Let me remind you. According to the Stern Review (2006:1), ‘The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: climate change presents very serious global risks, and it demands an urgent global response.’ Many people have argued that the retail sector has a crucial role to play in this global fight against climate change (and, of course, it was this and similar arguments that persuaded Tesco to introduce carbon labelling on some of its products and to fund research in this area). According to Forum for the Future (2007):

Retail has a vital role to play in delivering sustainable development. It employs 2.9 million people and generates almost 6% of the GDP of the UK. It is responsible for approximately 2.5% of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions and has a disproportionate influence over society and the economy through its marketing, regular customer transactions and complex, globalised supply chains. (2007:8)

Therefore, in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is vital that consumers reduce the carbon footprints of the products they buy. One common argument is that this is best done not through legislation or prohibition, by restricting what consumers can or cannot buy, but by providing all consumers with appropriate information about the carbon footprint of a product so that they can make an informed choice, effectively empowering consumers and revolutionising our patterns of consumption.

As Sir Terry Leahy (Chief Executive of Tesco) commented (2007), ‘To achieve a mass movement in green consumption we must empower everyone – not just the enlightened or the affluent.’ This philosophy resulted in the inclusion of carbon footprint information on an increasing number of products, which should guide consumers (
en masse
) to greener choices: assuming, of course, that they have the right underlying attitude to ‘green’ or low-carbon-footprint products in the first place. This latter point is crucial because if consumers don’t have the right positive attitude to low-carbon-footprint products, it is unlikely that the inclusion of carbon footprint information will have any effect on consumer choice or behaviour. However, the studies that I have just outlined provide evidence that, in a sample of UK consumers in 2008, the vast majority not only had positive
explicit
attitudes to low-carbon-footprint products, as measured by the usual self-report measures, but also had very positive
implicit
attitudes to such products, as measured by the Implicit Association Test (IAT). These studies, therefore, give some psychological weight to the fundamental argument that we may, in fact, be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through consumer behaviour, because it
demonstrates that many consumers (and not just a green minority) have exactly the right underlying attitude to low-carbon-footprint products in the first place. Therefore, there is a cogent argument that, in the case of many consumers, the provision of the carbon footprint information will allow their underlying attitude to be realised in actual behaviour.

But, of course, things might not be quite as simple as this. In everyday shopping, consumers are bombarded with product information and there is the danger, therefore, that the carbon footprint information will be not attended to, neglected or lost during the shopping experience. The carbon footprint information may be out there (on some products), but is it attended to and processed in the appropriate time frame? As Louw and Kimber (2007:6) have noted:

In a standard supermarket the typical shopper passes about 300 brands per minute (Rundh 2005). This translates into less than one-tenth of a second for a single product to get the attention of the customer and spark purchase (Gelperowic and Beharrel 1994:7) … Even in high involvement situations, most consumers don’t have the time, ability or information to assess all the pros and cons before purchase. Instead they rely on various cues (e.g. brand name, packaging etc) to help them make their decision. (Zeithaml 1988)

Carbon footprint information has to stand out in this general cognitive environment in which time is very much of the essence, and much information has to be ignored or processed very superficially before the purchasing decision is made.

So how is carbon footprint information currently represented on products? The form of representation currently being tested in the UK uses iconography (an image in black-and-white of an actual ‘literal’ footprint), accompanied by substantial amounts of text, numbers and scientific abbreviations both on the footprint (e.g. ‘12 kg CO
₂
’, ‘Compared to 100 W conventional 55 kg’) and above and below the footprint (e.g. ‘working with the Carbon Trust’, ‘per 1000 hrs
of use’, ‘The carbon footprint of this light bulb is 12 kg per 1000 hours of use and we have committed to reduce the footprint of future equivalent light bulbs. By comparison the footprint for the equivalent conventional light bulb (100 W) is 55 kg per 1000 hours of use’). But all this information has to compete with large amounts of other information on the packaging (some also connected to ‘green’ issues, like the temperature that the detergent can be used at) on the fronts, backs and sides of products. For example, in three common products (sold in Tesco, UK), already labelled with carbon footprint information, this information has to compete with the information shown in Tables
7.1
,
7.2
and
7.3
.

These products thus have a range of pictures, diagrams, icons, numbers and text (with the text in different-sized fonts), all competing for the consumers’ attention in a very

Table 7.1
Information displayed on Tesco’s low-energy light bulb packaging

Table 7.2
Information displayed on Tesco’s freshly squeezed orange juice carton

limited time frame. Again, as Louw and Kimber (2007:14) have noted:

Shoppers typically only look at a label for about five to seven seconds, regardless of how many elements or messages there are on the package. Therefore, adding additional messages to the package increases the likelihood that a shopper will miss any single message. For this reason it is generally recommended that only two to three key points of communication are placed on a front label. Adding more messages is likely to clutter the label (which often detracts from appeal and perceived quality), and makes it more difficult for people to absorb the key information/communication from the label. (Young 2003)

This might be a key recommendation from some researchers in this area, but it does not prevent some retailers from

Table 7.3
Information displayed on Tesco’s ‘Non-Bio’ liquid detergent container

including nine sets of key information on the front of the packaging of a light bulb (the one used in this experiment), seven on the front of the orange juice and eight on the front of the detergent. Moreover, the carbon footprint icon or the accompanying textual information is not represented on the front of any of these three products – instead it is represented on the backs of both the bulb and the detergent and on the side of the orange juice. The question then becomes: how salient is this carbon footprint information, especially under the time constraints of normal shopping, when many consumers are choosing products without much prior consideration (Hausman 2000; Silayoi and Speece 2004; see also Louw and Kimber 2007)? Time pressure must (by definition) reduce the detailed consideration of elements on a package, but how is attentional resource distributed to carbon footprint information compared to each of the other elements represented on the package?

One possible way of investigating this is by using eye-tracking technology to measure visual attention to each element on the packaging by tracking the overt movement of the eyes and measuring each period of fixation. Eye movements provide ‘an unobtrusive, sensitive, real-time behavioural index of ongoing visual and cognitive processing’ (Henderson and Ferreira 2004:18) and give us clear and reliable data on the allocation of attention (see also Holsanova, Holmberg and Holmqvist 2008). The basic operation of the eyes in processing information runs as follows.

When we read, look at a scene, or search for an object, we continually make eye movements called
saccades
. Between the saccades, our eyes remain relatively still during
fixations
for about 200–300 ms. There are differences in these two measures as a function of the particular task … Saccades are rapid movements of the eyes with velocities as high as 500° per second. Sensitivity to visual input is reduced during eye movements; this phenomenon is called
saccadic suppression
(Matin 1974) … We do not obtain new information during a saccade, because the eyes are moving so quickly across the stable visual stimulus that only a blur would be perceived (Uttal and Smith 1968) … As we look straight ahead, the visual field can be divided into three regions:
foveal, parafoveal
and
peripheral
. Although acuity is very good in the fovea (the central 2° of vision), it is not nearly so good in the parafovea (which extends out to 5° on either side of fixation), and it is even poorer in the periphery (the region beyond the parafovea). Hence, we move our eyes so as to place the fovea on that part of the stimulus we want to see clearly. (Rayner 1998:373–374; emphasis in original)