I Can Feel Your Pain: Investigating the Role of Empathy and Guilt on Sustainable Behavioral Intentions to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Plastic Bags among College Students

Plastic bag pollution in the marine environment is an urgent issue that has negatively impacted the sustainability of marine biodiversity. Studying effective ways to design advocacy messages that can promote individuals’ intentions to reduce, reuse, and recycle plastic bags in order to mitigate plastic bag pollution in the effort to help restore marine biodiversity is necessary. Utilizing emotional appeal messages, such as messages that are designed to elicit audiences’ feelings of empathy, can promote a variety of pro-environmental behaviors. To investigate an effective way to generate empathy, this online experiment study conducted with 257 college students in the U.S. examined whether messages that encourage perspective-taking can successfully elicit empathy among participants. Additionally, the study explored whether messages that encourage perspective-taking can promote viewers’ behavioral intentions to engage in the 3Rs (reduce, reuse, and recycle plastic bags) via the mediating roles of empathy and guilt. Results indicated that perspective-taking messages can increase viewers’ empathy, which was positively associated with feelings of guilt, which in turn was positively associated with viewers’ 3Rs behavioral intentions. The study also investigated the influence of self-efficacy on guilt as well as the interaction of self-efficacy and perspective-taking on guilt. Results suggested that self-efficacy did not have an effect on guilt, and the effects of self-efficacy and perspective-taking on guilt were independent of each other. These findings demonstrate that messages encouraging perspective-taking can positively affect individuals’ 3Rs behavioral intentions to reduce plastic waste as a means to restore marine biodiversity.