Investigating Pro-Environmental Attitude for Designing Affective Eco-Feedback

Abstract This research examines the relationship between attitudes towards individual pro-environmental behavior and emotional intensity in response to eco-feedback designs for sustainable behavior change. This user-centered approach was performed in three phases. In the first phase, workshops were conducted with users who generated visual and written content in response to prompts on environmental attitudes. For the second phase, the research team created ten eco-feedback product sketches for electricity conservation, which were informed by qualitative analysis of 67 workshop participants’ content. Experimental sketches included positive and negative message framing, while control sketches provided generic baselines for comparison. Finally, for the third phase, 60 workshop participants were surveyed for emotional intensity in response to the eco-feedback sketches. Significant correlations were found between users’ attitudes and emotional intensity towards experimental designs compared to control designs. Users with positive attitudes towards individual conservation behaviors exhibited the strongest positive and negative emotions in response to designs with positive and negative message framing, respectively. While experiencing lesser degrees of emotional intensity, users with neutral or negative attitudes responded with statistically significant negative emotional intensity to experimental designs with negative message framing. These findings demonstrate that strategic message framing, tailored to users based on their pre-existing attitudes, can drive emotional responses and, consequently, motivation for sustainable behavior change across diverse attitude profiles.