Shopping for Clothes and Sensitivity to the Suffering of Others: The Role of Compassion and Values in Sustainable Fashion Consumption

Abstract

The positive relation of biospheric and altruistic values as well as the negative relation of egoistic and hedonic values to environmentally responsible behavior, are established findings in environmental psychological research. Recent findings revealed that compassion, the sensitivity to the suffering of other individuals, is also relevant for proenvironmental intentions. We tested the role of compassion in combination with universal altruistic, biospheric, egoistic, and hedonic values concerning an environmentally responsible behavior with an explicit social and hedonic component: sustainable fashion consumption. In a large survey study (n = 981), we found that compassion was positively linked to sustainable purchase criteria. The manipulation of compassion in an online study (n = 197) resulted in a small, positive effect on the willingness to pay extra for fair trade clothes. Moreover, we found that hedonic values showed a consistent negative relation to sustainable fashion consumption in both studies, thus corroborating former research on the critical relevance of hedonic values in the context of proenvironmental behavior.

Keywords

compassion altruistic values biospheric values egoistic values hedonic values sustainable fashion consumption

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