Greenwashing your personality

Research output: Working paper

Abstract

Behaving more sustainable has been shown to signal cooperativeness in social dilem- mas. We investigate whether people exploit this apparent signaling value by inflating their intention to behave sustainably without changing their actual behavior. We explore this question in an online experiment in which participants self-report the im- portance of sustainability in their daily lives before engaging in a prisoner’s dilemma game. Using a between-subjects design, we manipulate whether participants have the opportunity to adjust their self-reported sustainability scores after receiving instruc- tions for the game. The results show that almost 30% of participants increase their sustainability scores in anticipation of higher transfers from their matched partners. However, this greenwashing strategy proves to be unsuccessful, as higher sustainability scores do not lead to higher transfers.
Original languageAmerican English
PublisherTUM School of Social Sciences and Technology & TUM School of Management
Volume04
StatePublished - 2023

Publication series

NameMunich Papers in Political Economy

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