Environmentally motivated travel reduction: The effects of availability, herding bias, and self-monitoring

Abstract

Asking consumers to consume less, or to travel less, does not necessarily make them do so and is, therefore, a key challenge for public policy-makers and green marketers. In this paper, we scrutinize the effect of intuitive decisions/judgments as well as personality differences on consumers’ intentions to consume less. More specifically, we study how the availability heuristic, herding biases, and self-monitoring influence environmentally motivated consumption reduction (EMCR) in a tourism context. Drawing on EMCR and a heuristics-and-biases approach, we present an experimental study designed to test how availability (high vs. low information availability), herding behavior (herd present vs. no herd), and high vs. low self-monitoring influence consumers’ intentions to travel less in the future. The results suggest that the existence of a herd influence environmentally motivated travel reductions. Also, high self-monitors are more capable of sensing the eco-friendly direction of the public opinion in general, and adjust their behavior to align with this, than individuals with a lower self-monitoring tendency. Finally, there is a positive interaction between herding bias and self-monitoring, while we found no significant effect of the availability heuristic on the environmentally motivated travel reduction. The implications of the results and future research avenues are discussed.