Good News or Bad News? How Message Framing Influences Consumers’ Willingness to Buy Green Products
Open accessAbstract
Despite the growing social interest in green products, companies often find it difficult to find effective strategies to induce consumers to purchase green products or engage in other environmentally friendly behaviors. To address this situation, we examined the favorable or unfavorable effects of positive and negative message frames on consumers’ willingness to consume green products in different psychological distance contexts. Through two Studies, we found that the positive information framework played a more pronounced role in context when consumers were in closer spatial distances. More importantly, we found that the emotional factors of fear and hope were intrinsic causes of this phenomenon. Correspondingly, the negative information framework played a better facilitating role in context with farther spatial distance, while shame and pride were the emotions responsible for this effect. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our work, as well as its limitations and future research directions.
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Health consciousness positively impacts moral norms regarding healthy eating.
“Multiple studies have demonstrated that health consciousness significantly influences the development of moral norms regarding food choices, as consumers categorize foods not just by their health benefits, but through an ethical lens of “good” versus “bad” choices [49,82].”
From Psychological Determinants of Healthy Food Purchase Intention: An Integrative Model Based on Health Consciousness (2025) · cites this paper as [82]
Theoretical Background and Assumptions discusses emotions and environmentally friendly purchases, not health consciousness or moral norms about healthy eating. Searches for those concepts and for ethical classifications of food found no passage in our copy that addresses the claimed relationship; the References section lists a study of virtue and vice foods, but does not report this finding. No page numbers are available in the indexed passages. (LLM, conf=0.73)
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- Authors
- Tong, Z., Liu, D., Ma, F., & Xu, X.
- Affiliations
- Hainan University (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Xu, Xiaobing
- Venue
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2021-01-19
- Volume
- 11
- Pages
- 568586-568586
- ISSN
- 1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC7874151
- OpenAlex
- W3125661010
- Cited by
- 22
- References
- 53
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 6
- FWCI
- 3.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Frontiers in Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (71772003, 71962007, 71872184)
- Hainan University (kyqd[sk]1919)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Marketing › Environmental Sustainability in Business
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law › Environmental Education and Sustainability
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Keywords
- message framing, green products, purchase intention, psychological distance, positive framing, negative framing, fear, hope, shame, pride, consumer behavior, environmental behavior
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