When Do Environmental Attitudes Lead to Action? Contextual Moderation in Everyday Laundry Practices in France

This study examines when and how environmental attitudes translate into sustainable household behavior by analyzing everyday laundry practices in France. Drawing on the Attitude–Behavior–Context (ABC) model and practice-oriented approaches to domestic energy use, we conducted in-depth interviews with 13 French adults. The analysis identifies four interrelated contextual moderators: temporal constraints, cleanliness norms, infrastructural limitations, and institutional trust. These factors shaped whether pro-environmental attitudes became consequential for laundering practices or were weakened, displaced, or blocked by competing domestic commitments. The findings show that the attitude–behavior gap is not simply a matter of insufficient motivation or information, but a patterned outcome of everyday practices whose material, temporal, normative, and institutional arrangements make some actions easier than others. The study contributes to environmental behavior research by specifying how contextual moderation operates in a high-frequency, culturally embedded household practice and by clarifying the ABC model’s heuristic value alongside practice-oriented approaches.