Sustainable persuasive system: Enhancing policy support and behavioural intentions for indoor waste classification

Environmental campaigns traditionally focus on environmental perspectives, which may limit their long-term persuasive effectiveness. This study introduces a sustainable persuasive system that integrates both gain-loss framing and topic framing (health, economic and environmental perspectives) to assess which message combinations most effectively encourage policy support and behavioural intentions towards indoor or household waste classification: A 2 (gain vs. loss framing) × 3 (topic framing: environment vs. economy vs. health) between-subjects. An experiment was conducted with 698 Chinese participants. The results demonstrated that gain-framed messages could significantly increase the willingness to classify waste, although they produced no notable impact on policy support. Health-framed messages emerged as more effective in encouraging participation in waste classification compared to environmental or economic frames. Furthermore, economic-framed messages outperformed environmental-framed ones. Additionally, the interaction between gain-loss framing and topic framing could significantly influence behavioural intentions. Specifically, environmental- and economic-framed messages were more persuasive under the gain frame, whereas health-framed messages were more impactful under the loss frame. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings from sustainable persuasive systems are further discussed.