Green skepticism indirectly reduces intention to purchase sustainable products

Photo Credit: Helena Lopes

Scientific Frontline: "At a Glance" Summary: How Green Skepticism Undermines Sustainable Purchasing

• Main Discovery: Green skepticism indirectly lowers consumer intention to purchase sustainable products by simultaneously decreasing the motivation to seek out green product information and reducing the anticipated guilt associated with selecting non-sustainable alternatives.
• Methodology: Researchers utilized a parallel mediation framework to analyze cognitive and emotional mechanisms, collecting and statistically evaluating data from an online survey administered to 511 valid Chinese consumers in September 2025.
• Key Data: Statistical analysis of the 511 valid survey responses revealed a significant negative correlation between green skepticism and both information-seeking behavior and anticipated guilt; notably, the direct relationship between skepticism and purchase intention lacked statistical significance.
• Significance: The findings overturn the conventional assumption that skeptical consumers engage in deeper verification and fact-checking, demonstrating instead that skepticism in low-trust environments primarily triggers cognitive and moral disengagement.
• Future Application: Market interventions must shift from conventional persuasive or moral appeals to credibility-based strategies involving transparent, verifiable environmental data and robust third-party certifications to counteract consumer withdrawal.
• Branch of Science: Environmental Psychology, Behavioral Economics, Consumer Science.
• Additional Detail: The research emphasizes that skepticism operates as a psychological brake rather than a fact-checking engine, necessitating future longitudinal studies to track these disengagement-oriented patterns across varying international markets.

Conceptual illustration of how green skepticism reduces purchase intention by lowering information seeking and a sense of responsibility.
Illustration Credit: Eunji Seo / Hiroshima University

As the world continues the transition to a sustainable economy and society, the behavior of consumers in purchasing sustainable or green products (green purchase intention) is an important aspect. In this transition, many companies engage in greenwashing: a practice of making inaccurate or misleading claims about their sustainability practices or environmental impact of their products, seeking to profit from green purchase intention without any investment in sustainability. 

Many consumers are now aware of greenwashing and its widespread nature. This has led to consumers adopting green skepticism: they do not trust sustainability claims made by companies. Green skepticism has recently been subject to greater academic research. 

A research team at Hiroshima University has developed a conceptual framework to examine how green skepticism shapes consumers’ green purchase intention by integrating cognitive and emotional mechanisms. They showed that green skepticism affects the intention to purchase sustainable products by weakening information seeking and anticipated guilt. This challenges the common assumption that skeptical consumers will just investigate more before deciding on purchases. 

Research on green skepticism is not yet comprehensive: empirical findings are inconsistent, the psychological mechanisms triggered by green skepticism are misunderstood, and past studies have not proposed an integrated framework to unify cognitive and emotional responses. In addition, the current assumption underlying green skepticism research is that it stimulates greater information processing and moral engagement. In other words, customers conduct in-depth research before purchasing a sustainable product or are troubled by guilt when faced with making an environmentally harmful choice. However, this assumption has not been rigorously tested. 

To address these issues, the researchers set out to examine the association between green skepticism and green purchase intention by integrating cognitive and emotional mechanisms within a parallel mediation framework. This framework allowed them to observe both internal and external psychological processes through which green skepticism shapes consumers’ green purchase intention. 

“We asked how consumer skepticism toward environmental claims actually reduces their willingness to buy green products,” says Eunji Seo, associate professor at Hiroshima University’s Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences. “Instead of assuming that skepticism directly lowers purchase intention, we focus on the underlying psychological processes. Specifically, we test whether green skepticism decreases consumers’ motivation to seek information about green products and weakens the anticipated guilt they might feel when choosing non-green options.” 

The researchers developed three following hypotheses after conducting a comprehensive review of existing scientific literature on green skepticism: 

1. Green skepticism negatively influences green purchase intention. 
2. Green product information seeking behavior mediates the relationship between green skepticism and green purchase intention. (positively or negatively) 
3. Anticipated guilt mediates the relationship between green skepticism and green purchase intention. (positively or negatively) 

They tested these assumptions by creating and administering an online survey to Chinese consumers between 10 and 20 September 2025. 575 responses were received, and 511 were deemed valid for analysis. Of the valid responses, 43.1% were male and 56.9% were female; 15.1% were between 18 and 25 years old, 59.9% were between 26 and 35 years old, 20.2% were between 36 and 45 years old, 3.1% were between 46 and 55 years old, and 1.8% were aged 56 or above; and the majority of participants (88.8%) held or were pursuing an undergraduate degree.   

The survey responses were subjected to statistical analysis to test the validity of the three hypotheses. The researchers concluded that the direct relationship between green skepticism and green purchase intention is negative but not statistically significant, contradicting previous studies that have reported a significant negative association. Additionally, there is a significant negative relationship between green skepticism and green product information seeking, contrary to the dominant skepticism-as-verification view. Furthermore, green skepticism may encourage cognitive disengagement and information avoidance in the face of unresolved uncertainty. Green skepticism is also negatively associated with anticipated guilt, whereas anticipated guilt is positively associated with green purchase intention.  

“The most important message is that green skepticism does not simply make consumers reject green products directly,” Seo explains. “Instead, it works more subtly by weakening two important drivers of green consumption: people’s willingness to look for trustworthy environmental information and their anticipated guilt about making less sustainable choices. In other words, skepticism can shut down engagement rather than encourage careful verification. This challenges the common assumption that skeptical consumers will just investigate more before deciding. Our findings suggest that, in low-trust environments, skepticism may lead not to deeper scrutiny, but to withdrawal from both cognitive and moral engagement.” 

The researchers highlighted the theoretical and practical contributions of the framework and their study. They documented an empirically observed disengagement-oriented response pattern associated with green skepticism, offering an alternative perspective to the dominant verification-oriented account in prior research. In practice, addressing green skepticism likely requires credibility-based interventions—such as transparent, verifiable environmental information and strengthened third-party certification—rather than conventional persuasive or moral appeals. 

“The real impact of green skepticism appeared indirectly: higher skepticism was associated with lower information seeking and weaker anticipated guilt, and both of these were positively linked to green purchase intention,” Seo elaborates. “A useful way to think about this is that skepticism does not always act like a ‘fact-checking engine.’ In many cases, it acts more like a 'psychological brake,’ reducing consumers’ willingness to engage with green information at all.” 

“The next step is to move beyond cross-sectional self-reported data and test these mechanisms using longitudinal, experimental, and behavioral approaches,” Seo concludes. “Future research should also examine whether the same disengagement-oriented patterns appear in other countries and in different institutional settings, because skepticism may operate differently across markets.” 

Funding: This study was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI (23K01647). 

Published in journal: Sustainability

Title: How Green Skepticism Undermines Green Purchase Intention: The Roles of Information Seeking and Anticipated Guilt

Authors: Shengyi Zhou, and Eunji Seo

Source/Credit: Hiroshima University

Reference Number: psy040726_01

Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Contact Us