Bring your own bag, enjoy an ice cream treat

Environmentally friendly people, feeling good about themselves, treat themselves to indulgences like ice cream. PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • The researchers attribute the changes to two distinct, largely unconscious processes. The first, called the priming effect, comes into play when you bring reusable bags and then “behave in a congruent fashion, and buy environmentally friendly products.

When people bring reusable bags to the grocery store — and actually remember to take them in from the car — they are more likely to take another environmentally friendly step. Then, feeling good about themselves, they treat themselves to indulgences like ice cream.

Researchers at Harvard Business School and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business who analysed more than two million trips to a California supermarket and conducted experiments to determine whether the act of bringing reusable bags actually changed consumer behaviour. They concluded that it did.

The researchers attribute the changes to two distinct, largely unconscious processes. The first, called the priming effect, comes into play when you bring reusable bags and then “behave in a congruent fashion, and buy environmentally friendly products.

The other effect, called the licensing effect.

“Previous research suggests that making a virtuous decision in one domain allows you to make an indulgence in a different domain,”  said Uma R. Karmarkar, another study author and an assistant professor at Harvard.