The impact of social norms on pro‐environmental behavior: A systematic literature review of the role of culture and self‐construal

Abstract

This paper documents state‐of‐the‐art research on the impact of social norms on pro-environmental consumer behavior. Our aim was to identify possible research gaps, in particular in terms of the moderating role of culture and self‐construal, and to suggest potentially fruitful research avenues. To achieve these objectives, we conducted a systematic review of the literature on the impact of social norms on sustainability over the past 20 years, placing emphasis on the role of culture and self‐construal. Altogether, we collected over 16,000 papers via Web of Science and subsequently used NVivo 12 for a fine‐grained qualitative analysis. Our findings provide several new insights. First, we identified the most popular research areas, top journals and leading authors in the field of social norms and pro‐environmental sustainability. Second, we pinpointed the most popular research topics in the context of the norm–sustainability relationship. Third, we revealed how culture and self‐construal have been addressed when researching the connection between social norms and pro‐environmental behavior, identified managerial implications, and offered future research directions on the moderating effects of culture and self‐construal.