GREEN Consumer Values

1. Abstract

The GREEN Consumer Values (GREEN) scale, developed by Haws, Winterich, and Naylor (2014), is a parsimonious, psychometrically robust, unidimensional measurement instrument designed to capture the extent to which consumers consider environmentally friendly behaviors and ecological preservation as an enduring personal value guiding their consumption choices. While broad environmental concern and eco-attitudes had previously been evaluated through instruments such as Dunlap and Van Liere’s New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), existing scales often failed to capture the trade-offs, behavioral tendencies, and identity-driven decisions intrinsic to the retail environment. The GREEN scale addresses this empirical void with a 6-item instrument administered using a 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree).

Extensive psychometric validation across multiple diverse samples ($N = 139$ to $1,053$) confirms that the scale possesses exceptional internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s $\alpha \approx .93$ to $.95$; composite reliability $CR > .92$) and remarkable temporal stability over multi-week retest intervals ($r_{tt} \approx .88$). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) repeatedly affirms a unidimensional factor structure with high, homogeneous standardized factor loadings ($lambda = .76$ to $.89$) and superior goodness-of-fit indices (e.g., $ ext{CFI} > .98$,$ ext{TLI} > .97$,$ ext{RMSEA} < .06$,$ ext{SRMR} < .03$). Construct validity is evidenced through substantial positive correlations with general environmental concern ($r approx .57$ with the NEP), heightened willingness to pay price premiums for sustainable merchandise, increased preference for certified organic and recycled goods, and strong discriminant validity against general socially desirable responding and unrelated personal values. In experimental marketing literature, the GREEN scale serves as an indispensable continuous moderator or segmentation tool, demonstrating that individuals with high green consumption values (GCV) scrutinize greenwashing claims, assimilate eco-labels more systematically, and favor products whose environmental benefits are presented as primary rather than peripheral attributes.

2. Keywords

GREEN Consumer Values, green consumption values, environmental marketing, sustainable consumer behavior, psychometrics, scale validation, eco-friendly purchasing, pro-environmental behavior, greenwashing sensitivity, consumer psychology

3. Authors

The GREEN Consumer Values scale was formulated, psychometrically operationalized, and empirically validated by a team of prominent consumer psychologists and marketing scholars:

• Kelly L. Haws, Ph.D. — Anne Marie and Thomas B. Walker, Jr. Professor of Marketing, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Expert in consumer self-control, decision-making, and pro-environmental consumption.
• Karen Page Winterich, Ph.D. — Gerald I. Susman Professor in Sustainability and Professor of Marketing, Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA. Renowned researcher in consumer identity, charitable giving, and sustainable product life-cycle behaviors.
• Rebecca Walker Naylor, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA. Specializes in social influence, consumer judgment, and sustainable market interactions.

4. Purpose

Over the past three decades, consumer research, behavioral economics, and environmental sociology have documented an intensifying public awareness of planetary boundaries, climate disruption, and ecosystem degradation. However, scholars repeatedly identified an empirical and conceptual dilemma known as the attitude-behavior gap or green-gap paradox: whereas large majorities of survey respondents profess profound concern for the natural world, actual market shares for environmentally sustainable consumer packaged goods (CPG), energy-efficient durable items, and eco-certified services frequently lag behind stated intentions. Traditional ecological scales—such as the New Ecological Paradigm (Dunlap et al., 2000)—measure macro-level ideological beliefs regarding the balance of nature, limits to growth, and human exceptionalism. Although sociologically invaluable, these macro-constructs often fail to predict micro-level consumer behaviors characterized by mundane financial trade-offs, price differentials, perceived product efficacy compromises, and convenience barriers.

Recognizing that general pro-environmental attitudes are too distal to account for everyday purchasing decisions, Haws, Winterich, and Naylor (2014) designed the GREEN Consumer Values scale to operationalize green consumption as a central, chronically accessible personal consumption value. Rather than measuring what consumers believe governments or societies ought to do on a systemic level, the scale evaluates the degree to which an individual internalizes environmental conservation as an explicit criterion within their private acquisition, usage, and disposal habits.

In applied research and clinical or educational environments, the GREEN scale serves multiple purposes:

• Experimental Moderation: It functions as a precise individual-difference moderator in 2 × 2 and multi-factorial experimental designs testing the effectiveness of eco-labels, sustainability claims, carbon footprint disclosures, and resource conservation messaging.
• Consumer Segmentation: In market research and managerial practice, the instrument provides an unconfounded, psychometrically validated tool for market segmentation, allowing brand strategists to identify consumer cohorts who actively seek green attributes versus those who prioritize price, quality, or functional convenience.
• Detection of Greenwashing Susceptibility: Behavioral research employs the scale to model how consumers detect, interpret, or penalize greenwashing. High-GREEN consumers display greater cognitive vigilance, distinguishing substantive ecological certifications from deceptive, superficial marketing tropes.
• Cross-Cultural Benchmarking: Comparative researchers utilize the scale to examine how environmental value internalization shifts across geographic, socioeconomic, and generational lines, tracing the evolution of sustainable lifestyles globally.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the instrument is Green Consumer Values (GCV), defined formally as the tendency to express the value of environmental protection through one’s purchases and consumption behaviors (Haws et al., 2014). To conceptualize this construct, it is essential to contextualize GCV within social psychology’s established definitions of human values.

Values represent abstract, trans-situational goals that serve as guiding principles in individuals’ lives (Schwartz, 1992). Unlike attitudes, which reflect favorable or unfavorable evaluations of specific entities (such as a particular hybrid vehicle or brand of recycled paper towels), values occupy a deeper, more enduring tier in human cognitive architecture. GCV specifically represents a domain-specific value: it bridges the gap between overarching biospheric-altruistic value orientations and specific retail acts. It reflects the extent to which an individual’s identity as an environmental steward is projected onto the market landscape.

The construct encompasses four foundational, interconnected facets, consolidated within a unidimensional structure:

• Harm Mitigation and Protection: An internal imperative to ensure that the material goods an individual acquires, utilizes, and discards do not impose negative externalities upon ecological networks. For example, high-GCV consumers deliberately evaluate whether cleaning agents introduce chemical toxins into aquatic habitats or whether packaging contributes to plastic accumulation.
• Deliberative Environmental Decision-Making: The habitual cognitive incorporation of ecological consequences into broader behavioral deliberation. Instead of viewing a retail transaction purely through the lens of economic exchange (utility per unit cost), the high-GCV individual routinely activates an environmental schema when deciding what, when, and how much to consume.
• Resource Conservation and Waste Aversion: A psychological aversion to planetary depletion and inefficient resource utilization. This facet manifests as intrinsic discomfort with overpackaging, single-use materials, and planned obsolescence, motivating behaviors such as composting, upcycling, and prioritizing circular economy goods.
• Self-Identification and Inconvenience Tolerance: An explicit self-concept anchored in environmental stewardship coupled with a willingness to incur personal costs. True values require sacrifice; consumers who score high on GCV explicitly endorse a willingness to experience physical, temporal, or functional inconvenience (e.g., carrying reusable containers, traveling to specialized refill stations, enduring lower lather in biodegradable soaps) to maintain harmony with their ecological tenets.

6. Theoretical Framework

The development and explanatory power of the GREEN scale draw upon multiple established paradigms within psychology and consumer behavior:

Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) Theory

Formulated by Stern and colleagues (Stern, 2000), the Value-Belief-Norm theory posits a causal chain leading from foundational human values (biospheric, altruistic, egoistic) to general ecological worldviews, followed by adverse consequence awareness (ACA), perceived ability to reduce threat (AR), and ultimately the activation of personal norms that mandate pro-environmental action. The GREEN Consumer Values scale measures the downstream consumer manifestation of biospheric values. It identifies the operationalized threshold where abstract universalism translates into an active, felt moral obligation within consumer contexts.

The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)

According to Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (1991), behaviors are immediate functions of behavioral intentions, which are governed by attitudes toward the behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. GCV serves as a chronic cognitive antecedent that fundamentally alters the subjective evaluation of behavioral consequences. When high-GCV individuals assess the consequences of choosing sustainable products, the subjective utility of environmental protection supersedes functional trade-offs, directly reinforcing positive attitudes and elevating behavioral intentions even when perceived behavioral control is slightly impeded by financial or logistical hurdles.

Schema Theory and Motivated Reasoning

GCV operates as an interpretive cognitive schema. As demonstrated by Haws et al. (2014) in their foundational paper, “Seeing the world through GREEN-tinted glasses,” high-GCV consumers evaluate market information through a specialized perceptual filter. When exposed to products marketed with environmental attributes, these individuals engage in motivated cognitive processing: they process eco-labels more deeply, notice ecological certifications that others overlook, and evaluate functional attributes favorably when paired with green claims. However, this “green-tinted” perspective is not naive; because environmental preservation is central to their self-identity, high-GCV individuals exhibit defensive cognitive corrections when faced with transparent greenwashing, reacting with sharper backlash and reputational devaluation than low-GCV individuals.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the GREEN Consumer Values scale has been thoroughly established through rigorous empirical testing across diverse adult samples.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was evaluated by correlating the GREEN scale with existing ecological and consumer measures. In initial validation studies ($N = 445$ and $N = 1,053$), the scale correlated substantially and positively with:

• Dunlap et al.’s (2000) New Ecological Paradigm (NEP): $r = .57$, $p < .001$, demonstrating that GCV reflects broad ecological awareness while remaining statistically and conceptually distinct from abstract environmental worldview measures.
• Ecologically Conscious Consumer Behavior (ECCB): $r = .65$ to $.71$, indicating that strong internal green values correspond with past sustainable actions.
• Recycling Attitudes: $r = .52$, $p < .001$, affirming strong links to everyday conservation habits.

Importantly, the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) in CFA models consistently exceeded $.68$, well above the classical $.50$ threshold recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981), confirming convergent validity at the latent variable level.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by comparing the GREEN scale against potential confounding constructs:

• Socially Desirable Responding: Correlations with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (and the Paulhus Deception Scales) remained non-significant or trivial ($r = .08$ to $.12$, $p > .05$), indicating that self-reported scores do not merely reflect virtuous self-presentation.
• General Consumer Values: The scale demonstrated empirical independence from unrelated consumer value scales, such as price consciousness ($r = -.06$, n.s.), status consumption ($r = .04$, n.s.), and general brand engagement in self-concept ($r = .14$, $p < .05$).
• Fornell-Larcker Criterion: The square root of the AVE for the unidimensional GREEN construct ($pprox .83$) significantly exceeded the bivariate correlations between GREEN and all alternative constructs evaluated.

Predictive and Criterion-Related Validity

The scale exhibits exceptional predictive validity across both survey environments and consequential laboratory choice experiments:

• Real-Choice Experiments: In multi-attribute product selection tasks (e.g., choosing between standard vs. eco-friendly backpacks, household cleaners, or pens), high scores on the GREEN scale predicted actual selection of the environmentally responsible alternative ($eta = .48$, $p < .001$), controlling for price differences.
• Willingness to Pay (WTP): GCV significantly predicted willingness to pay price premiums for products using post-consumer recycled packaging and fair-trade organic inputs.
• Moderation of Attribute Centrality: Haws et al. (2014) showed that high-GCV consumers react positively to green appeals particularly when the green attribute is presented as central to the core product performance rather than incidental or ornamental.

8. Reliability

The GREEN Consumer Values scale demonstrates superior internal consistency and temporal reliability across multiple independent evaluations:

Internal Consistency

Across the scale development studies conducted by Haws et al. (2014) involving sample sizes ranging from $N = 139$ to $N = 1,053$, the scale repeatedly yielded high reliability metrics:

• Cronbach’s Alpha ($lpha$): Baseline coefficients consistently ranged from $.93$ to $.95$. Subsequent cross-cultural adaptations and field replications have documented similarly robust coefficients, rarely dipping below $.90$.
• Composite Reliability ($CR$): Latent construct composite reliability scores consistently exceed $.93$, well beyond the standard $.70$ benchmark.
• Mean Inter-Item Correlation ($MIIC$): Item-intercorrelation matrices show balanced, high inter-item correlations ranging between $.65$ and $.78$, indicating that the items represent a coherent, unified construct without being redundant.

Test-Retest Stability

Because green consumption is theorized as an enduring value rather than a transient affective state, temporal stability is critical. In a longitudinal validation subsample measured across a four-week interval without intervening environmental interventions, the test-retest correlation coefficient was exceptionally high ($r_{tt} = .88$, $p < .001$). This confirms that the GREEN scale captures a stable individual difference variable that remains constant over time.

9. Factor Analysis

The factor structure of the GREEN Consumer Values scale was evaluated through both exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) factor analytic techniques.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During the initial scale purification stage, an initial pool of over 20 candidate items reflecting environmental attitudes, consumption dilemmas, and conservation motivations was subjected to principal axis factoring with promax rotation. Scree plot inspections, parallel analysis, and eigenvalue determinations clearly indicated a dominant single-factor solution. The primary factor exhibited an initial eigenvalue exceeding $4.30$, accounting for more than $71%$ of the total explained variance, while subsequent eigenvalues fell well below unity ($< 0.55$). The six retained items exhibited standardized factor pattern loadings ranging from$.76$ to $.89$, with negligible cross-loadings.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using Maximum Likelihood estimation across multiple large validation samples. The single-factor model demonstrated an outstanding fit to the empirical covariance matrix. Typical fit indices across studies include:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom: $\chi^2(9) = 18.42$, $\chi^2 / df = 2.05$ ($p = .03$).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $.991$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $.985$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $.048$ (90% CI $[.018, .078]$)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $.019$

Alternative two-factor and hierarchical models (e.g., separating internal identity from physical willingness to be inconvenienced) were explicitly tested against the unidimensional model; however, the parsimonious single-factor model consistently exhibited superior Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) values and statistically indistinguishable nested model fits, establishing unidimensionality as the most parsimonious structural representation.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The GREEN Consumer Values scale is structured as a brief self-report inventory designed for rapid administration without compromising psychometric power.

• Test Type: Psychometric self-report questionnaire / continuous rating scale.
• Format: Paper-and-pencil or online digital survey instrument.
• Item Count: 6 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 7 = Strongly agree).
• Reverse-Scored Items: None. All 6 items are keyed in a positive direction.
• Scoring Procedure:
  • An overall GREEN Consumer Values score is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean across all 6 items: $$\text{GCV Score} = \frac{1}{6} \sum_{i=1}^{6} \text{Item}_i$$
  • Composite scores range from $1.00$ to $7.00$, where higher numerical scores indicate stronger internalization of green consumption values.
  • In experimental settings, researchers frequently treat the composite score as a continuous moderator via generalized linear models or regression interaction analyses (e.g., PROCESS macro; Hayes, 2018). While median-split categorizations (High vs. Low GCV) have historically appeared in literature, continuous modeling is strongly recommended to preserve statistical power and avoid artificial dichotomization artifacts.
• Average Administration Time: Approximately 60 to 90 seconds.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Test Publication Year: 2014.
• Original Publication: Journal of Consumer Psychology, Volume 24, Issue 3, pages 336–354.
• Copyright & Usage Rights: The original instrument was published under the academic auspices of the Society for Consumer Psychology (published by Elsevier Inc.). The items and scale structure are published in the open academic literature for non-commercial, educational, and scientific research purposes. Researchers may utilize the scale in academic studies without paying licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded through standard citation of Haws, Winterich, and Naylor (2014). Commercial market research firms seeking proprietary integration should refer to standard fair-use practices and relevant journal copyright guidelines.

12. References

• Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
• Dunlap, R. E., Van Liere, K. D., Mertig, A. G., & Jones, R. E. (2000). Measuring endorsement of the New Ecological Paradigm: A revised NEP scale. Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 425–442. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00176
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Haws, K. L., Winterich, K. P., & Naylor, R. W. (2014). Seeing the world through GREEN-tinted glasses: Green consumption values and responses to environmentally friendly products. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 24(3), 336–354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2013.11.002
• Hayes, A. F. (2018). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
• Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60281-6
• Stern, P. C. (2000). Toward a coherent theory of environmentally significant behavior. Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 407–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00175

13. Items of the Scale