Feeling Ambivalent About Going Green

A survey explores factors that lead to consumers' ambivalent attitudes about green products and buying green products. An experiment further tests the moderating influence of this ambivalence on consumer responses to green advertising that suggests the advertisers exert different levels of green efforts (low, moderate, high). A proposed model predicts that high-effort claims induce greater levels of discomfort among ambivalent participants, which encourage them to engage in motivated processing in which they discount the believability of the ad, as well as that of the green claims. As a result, evaluations of the product become more negative. The experimental findings confirm these predictions.