The Role of Social Media Normative Interventions and Environmental Awareness in Intentions to Change Pro-Environmental Behaviors

Social media interventions to stimulate the adoption of pro-environmental behaviors is a topic of increasing interest in both Information Systems (IS) research and environmental studies. Yet, we still know little about the factors explaining the effectiveness of such interventions and how they influence decision-making in online social networks. By bringing together insights from both social science and IS research streams, this research-in-progress studies intentions to change towards pro-environmental behaviors as the result of exposure to normative social media content and the level of environmental awareness. We conducted an online experiment to explore intentions to change behaviors regarding the consumption of meat. We find that while individual environmental awareness is positively associated with intentions to change meat consumption, exposure to social norms in social media content is not significant in predicting intentions to change meat consumption. Since our findings suggest the importance of environmental awareness in decision-making towards sustainable behaviors, our future research will explore the inclusion of information provision to stimulate environmental awareness in combination with nudging on social media.