ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1648500
Encouraging people to set lower personal carbon budgets: anchoring is more effective than social reference groups
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
- 2University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
- 3University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Enabling people to set personal carbon budgets may help them to track and reduce their carbon footprint over time. In this study, we investigated ways to encourage a representative sample of the UK population (N = 2,047) to reduce their carbon footprint by setting themselves a lower carbon budget. In an online experiment, we simulated a carbon footprint calculator based on personal spending and tested the effects of two carbon footprint anchors (low vs. high) and three social reference groups (people in the UK vs. customers at the same bank vs. people with similar expenditure) on the carbon budget set by participants. We found that providing a low anchor, independent of the corresponding social reference group, was significantly associated with setting a lower carbon budget. Setting a lower carbon budget was associated with greater motivation and self-reported willingness to change behaviour to adhere to the budget.
Keywords: Carbon Footprint, carbon budget, anchoring, Social reference group, pro-environment behavior, consumption
Received: 17 Jun 2025; Accepted: 15 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Flecke, Aparicio and Malthouse. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Sarah Lynn Flecke, sarahflecke@gmail.com
Eugene Malthouse, eugene.malthouse1@nottingham.ac.uk
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.