From Self-Worth to Sustainable Choice: An Efficacy-Translation Account of Green Consumption

Abstract

Green consumption research has long documented a gap between favorable environmental attitudes and concrete sustainable choices. Yet less is known about why consumers who value sustainability sometimes doubt that their own actions can matter. Across five studies of Chinese consumer samples (N = 1499), this article develops an efficacy-translation account of green consumption. The account proposes that global self-esteem is associated with perceived consumer effectiveness (PCE), the belief that individual consumption can contribute to environmental improvement. It therefore specifies PCE as a domain-specific collective-impact belief rather than as a generic efficacy construct. The evidence incorporates trait and state self-esteem, measured and manipulated PCE, and multiple green-consumption outcomes, validated by robust regression, bootstrap mediation, internal meta-analysis, specification-curve analysis, and a limited computational audit. Self-esteem was positively associated with green consumption across the five studies, with a random effects pooled association of r=0.164, 95% CI [0.114, 0.213]. In Study 2A, the measured indirect association through PCE was 0.105, 95% bootstrap CI [0.048, 0.164]. These results are consistent with PCE as one pathway linking self-worth to sustainable consumption, but they do not establish causal mediation or generalize beyond the sampled cultural context.