A bustling overhead view of an urban market with various stalls selling fresh produce and goods. by Hanif Ismail via Pexels
.
Less is more. So why does more feel greener? 9 studies probe the “sustainable additive bias”
.
Consumers judge companies greener when they add eco-friendly items more so than when they remove unnecessary ones, researchers found.
.
.
People are drowning in eco-friendly swag—cloth tote bags, reusable water bottles, recycled notebooks, sustainable hotel toiletries, and on and on—distributed by organizations and companies eager to demonstrate their environmental bona fides.
What might be even more sustainable than manufacturing and distributing all these eco-friendly products is to just…stop. The trouble is that consumers have trouble giving brands credit for such restraint, a quirk of human psychology that researchers dub “sustainable additive bias” in a new paper.
“Companies that genuinely try to take eco-friendly actions, such as reducing packaging or promotional giveaways, are often not rewarded,” says study team member Linda Lemarié, associate professor of marketing at Audencia Business School in France. “What we don’t see is hard to take into consideration, and reduction leaves nothing visible, even though it’s often the best strategy from an environmental standpoint.”
In the paper, Lemarié and her colleagues conducted nine different studies to demonstrate how this bias works—and what companies can do about it.
The studies included a field experiment in which hotel guests rated the sustainability of the room they had stayed in, a lab experiment in which business school students chose gifts to hand out to trade show attendees, and seven online investigations in which a total of more than 2,900 participants were asked to evaluate complimentary hotel toiletries, hair care sets, music festival welcome bags, and other collections of products.
Overall, the studies show that consumers see businesses as more sustainable when they provide more eco-friendly items rather than when they remove unnecessary ones—even though subtracting can lead to lower waste and a smaller footprint.
.
“We were first surprised by the robustness and consistency of the effect across different contexts and with different metrics,” Lemarié says.
For example, study participants judged a hotel room stocked with a large selection of eco-friendly toiletries as more sustainable than a room with a more modest set of eco-friendly products. They also judged a limited-edition tea box to which eco-friendly tea filters had been added as more sustainable than one from which they had been removed.
“Then we were also surprised by the bias’s resistance to knowledge,” Lemarié says. When items weren’t labeled as being environmentally friendly, participants identified bundles with more items as being less sustainable than those with fewer. “This means that people do indeed correctly associate ‘addition with ‘less environmentally friendly.’”
But when the question of sustainability comes into play, people seem to use visible components as indicators of companies’ effort. The more items, the more effort, and the more effort, the more sustainability—at least, according to our imperfect brains.
Several of the experiments suggest sustainable additive bias can be counteracted when companies prioritize highly recognizable items as sustainability signals (that is, a refillable water bottle counts more than biodegradable glitter). One hints that explaining when items have been removed for environmental reasons might help, too.
But accomplishing this in the real world could be tricky, Lemarié says. “The question our research leaves open is how to effectively demonstrate, without appearing hypocritical or making people skeptical, that reducing elements of a product offering, and thus offering less, is a genuine effort in favor of the environment.”
Source: Lemarié L. et al. “The more, the better? The sustainable additive bias.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 2026.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine. AI-generated.
.
.
Discover more from MENA-Forum
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.