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Cited by 33Environmental Sustainability in BusinessConsumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and IdentificationSustainable Supply Chain Management

How to regain green consumer trust after greenwashing: experimental evidence from China

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Wang, Dandan, Walker, Thomas·2023·Sustainability
DOI 10.3390/su151914436
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Abstract

Greenwashing leads to consumer skepticism of all green products as well as doubts about company claims regarding sustainability. However, the understanding of how to regain green consumer trust after greenwashing is rather limited. The authors fill this gap by exploring the psychological process of green consumers following intervention strategies designed to reduce greenwashing. We collect and interpret quantitative data from two psychological experiments, the first experiment identified two types of intervention strategies that serve to counter the negative impact of greenwashing and based on our findings from the first studies, we proposed and tested the moderating effect of two factors—implicit beliefs of consumers and companies who implement intervention strategies after greenwashing. The results indicate that distrust regulation (quantifying a product’s green attributes) and trustworthiness demonstration (visualizing environmental behaviors) are effective intervention strategies that can enable consumers to re-evaluate the cost-benefit of green products, and which may serve as critical psychological factors for green consumers and contribute to the degree of trust. Validation and comparative study of the derived results show that distrust regulation, followed by trustworthiness demonstration, has the best effect on increasing green trust after intervention. If the sequence is reversed, the effect of the intervention strategy is worse than if only one strategy had been applied. The implicit beliefs of green consumers play a moderating role between intervention strategies and reconsideration of the cost-benefit of green products. The behavior of genuinely green companies and the incremental beliefs of consumers can promote the intervention effect after greenwashing. Alternatively, the behavior of greenwashing companies can easily counter these effects. These findings contribute to knowledge about which psychological factors can promote or hinder the effectiveness of an intervention.

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  • Social media influencers are central conduits for sustainability messaging, yet the processes by which their content converts attention into green consumer action remain insufficiently specified.

    “Social media influencers are central conduits for sustainability messaging, yet the processes by which their content converts attention into green consumer action remain insufficiently specified (Khurana et al., 2025;Kılıç and Gürlek, 2024;Wang and Walker, 2023).”

    From Cross-national evidence on influencer-driven green choice: a moderated-mediation model of authenticity, parasocial ties, and greenwashing exposure (2026) · cites this paper as Wang and Walker, 2023

    The Appendix B intervention text mentions social media only as a source of public attention to companies. Searches for “influencers” and for social-media influence on green consumer action found no passage addressing influencer messaging or a gap in understanding how it leads to action; the paper instead examines regaining trust after greenwashing. (LLM, conf=0.76)

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Wang, D., & Walker, T.
Affiliations
  • Tianjin University of Finance and Economics (CN)
  • Concordia University (CA)
Corresponding author
Wang, Dandan
ORCID
Venue
Sustainability
Publisher
MDPI AG
Published
2023-10-02
Volume
15
Issue
19
Pages
14436
ISSN
2071-1050 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.3390/su151914436
OpenAlex
W4387304439
Cited by
33
References
6
Citations by year
2026: 16 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 4
FWCI
8.73
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Sustainability (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Funders
National Social Science Fund of China (22BGL129)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Marketing › Environmental Sustainability in Business
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Marketing › Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Sustainable Supply Chain Management
Keywords
greenwashing, trust repair, intervention strategies, green companies

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