Can Social Norms Drive Public Green Behavior?
MEI Lei
CHANG Mengyao
Abstract：To reveal how social norms influenced individual green behavioral decision-making through cognitive and affective mechanisms,a research path of"social norms→environmental affect→green behavioral decision-making"was constructed on the basis of the stimulus-organism-response(SOR)model and the cognition-affect-behavior(CAB)model.Meanwhile,a comparative analysis was conducted between publicity posters with and without social norm information by means of eye-tracking experiments.Furthermore,an integrated mechanism of"visual guidance-affective arousal-behavioral response"was established.The results showed that the posters with social norm information significantly enhanced visual attention metrics,where the total fixation duration and fixation count under the social norm condition were increased by 314.21%and 337.50%,respectively,compared to the posters without social norms.In addition,the Bootstrap mediation test results demonstrated that environmental emotion played a significant mediating role between social norms and green behavioral decision-making.This study found that social norms stimulated environmental emotion by enhancing visual salience,thereby promoting the public's green behavioral decision-making.It was suggested that in the design of environmental protection communication,emphasis should be placed on the visual highlighting and emotional integration of social norms,so as to promote the transformation of behavioral intervention from the"information transmission"mode to the"perceptual experience"mode.
Keywords：social normsvisual attentionenvironmental affecteye-trackinggreen behavioral decision-making
Publication Date：2026-03-20
Online Publishing Date：2026-03-26(First online date of this platform, not the publication date of the document)
Pages：9( 116-123,136 )