I share because of who I am: values, identities, norms, and attitudes explain sharing intentions

ABSTRACT

To promote sustainable consumption, predictors of individuals’ intentions need to be understood. Focusing on the example of collaborative consumption, we look at facilitating and inhibiting factors in a preregistered correlational study (N = 378). We hypothesized the Value-Identity-Personal norm (VIP) model to explain variance in sharing intention. In addition, we expected sharing intentions to be linked to attitudes about (de-)ownership. We also hypothesized self-extension into an object to be a barrier to sharing this object. The results supported all hypotheses: The VIP model and de-ownership orientation were related to sharing intentions. Moreover, self-extension into a car was significantly higher among subsamples of car owners than car sharers. Exploratory findings show that the value-intention link predicted by the VIP can be found for biospheric as well as altruistic values if sharing intentions are assessed with items framed to match these respective values. We discuss implications for attempts to promote sustainable consumption.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative consumption
• value-identity-personal norm model
• self-extension
• car sharing
• identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/ndh84/, https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7HYR6.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/ndh84/ and https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7HYR6.

Online supplement

For the interested reader, the online supplement includes descriptive statistics, intercorrelations, further group differences between sharers and owners, analyses on self-extension into access, additional results regarding the fourth hypothesis, analyses of the discriminant validity of self-extension into a car and self-extension into access, as well as an exploration of the sustainability potential of car sharing.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Notes

1. The development of the positive environmental impact of collaborative consumption is a complex process and depends on additional factors. Research shows inconsistent and differentiated results on the sustainability effects of collaborative consumption (e.g., Schmitt et al., 2017). For more details concerning the context of car sharing and our contribution to this topic, the reader is referred to the online supplement in the OSF project folder (chapter 6).

2. For better readability, we do not differentiate between values and value orientations (Vaske & Donnelly, 1999) and refer to value orientations (biospheric, altruistic, egoistic) as values.

3. We performed a power analysis with G*Power (Faul et al., 2009), assuming a power of 1 – β = .95 to detect a small effect (referring to Lindblom’s and Lindblom’s (2017) research: f² = .05) at α = .0125.

4. Respondents had to answer to at least 75% of the items of each scale relevant to the main analyses.

5. The additional survey questions on motives for sharing and willingness to share one’s own car, which were purely explorative, can be found in the questionnaire file in the osf project.

6. Food sharing was excluded because it was identified as decreasing Cronbach’s alpha of the self-constructed scale.

7. The alternative was categorized as sustainable if the average greenhouse gas emission was lower than 60g/km. Additionally, alternatives implying the usage by more than one person were categorized as sustainable because the total emissions per person are comparably low. The data used for the categorization were derived from the German Federal Agency for the Environment (2018).

8. We excluded one item of the MVS scale (“I try to keep my life simple as far as possessions are concerned”) because it was identified to decrease Cronbach’s alpha and had a low selectivity.

9. We included the participation in car sharing in the measurement of the variable of actual sharing behavior, in addition to the participation in the sharing concepts presented in the variable sharing intentions—which are rental of everyday objects (e.g., tools)/communal gardens/food sharing (later excluded)/shared flats/sharing between neighbors. That means when a person indicated they use car sharing the value of sharing behavior was raised by a factor of one. The measurement of sharing intentions, however, did not include the concept car sharing.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Carolin Schuster

Carolin Schuster is Assistant Professor for Applied Social Psychology at Leuphana University Lüneburg. One of her major research interests concerns the role of values for socially relevant and sustainable behaviors and their effect on negotiations. She also conducts research on the roots of gender inequalities and the promotion of equality in different domains.

Tami Goseberg

Tami Goseberg has studied psychology at Leuphana University. She currently pursues a graduate degree in Intercultural Communication and Education at the University of Cologne. She is passionate about combining perspectives of social sciences and psychology on societal topics such as migration, global power structures, climate justice, and gender equality and translating these perspectives into adult education.

Janina Arnold

Janina Arnold is a graduate student of Intercultural Psychology at the University of Osnabrueck (Germany) with a double bachelor's degree in Psychology and Environmental & Sustainability Studies from Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany). She is particularly interested in sustainable consumer behavior and topics of intercultural business psychology. Her passion is to take interdisciplinary perspectives on sustainability challenges.

Anna Sundermann

Anna Sundermann is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Psychology and Education Sustainability at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany) and a member of the Research Group Sustainable Consumption and Sustainability Communication (SuCo2; https://suco2.com). Her research mainly focuses on the analysis of students’ learning processes in (Higher) Education for Sustainable Development. She is also interested in how learning and sustainability communication can support sustainable lifestyles.