Effects of sufficiency-promoting campaigns on the intention to avoid leisure air travel

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the effects of a sufficiency-promoting campaign on participants’ intention to reduce or avoid leisure air travel following the Theory of Planned Behavior. A quantitative online experiment was conducted with participants acquired in convenience sampling (N = 240) from which half were randomly selected to be exposed to a fictional campaign promoting sufficiency in leisure air travel. After that, all participants were asked to answer questions assessing attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control and intention to reduce or avoid leisure flights. In addition, past flight behavior, the number of flights in the last twelve months, environmental behavior, social desirability, and sociodemographic data were included as control variables. Findings – Mann-Whitney U tests revealed that the attitude towards reducing leisure air travel was significantly different between the groups: The group of participants exposed to the stimulus evaluated a reduction of air travel more positive. No differences were found for subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and intention. Findings from a two-step hierarchical regression analysis revealed attitude as the most significant predictor of intention. Within the Theory of Planned Behavior, subjective norm also had a significant, but small influence on intention. When relevant control variables were entered, sufficient past flight behavior for sustainability reasons emerged as a significant predictor, and subjective norm was no longer significant. This thesis suggests that sufficiency-promoting campaigns can be useful to create positive attitudes towards reducing leisure air travel. It calls for further longitudinal research on effects of more sophisticated campaigns on intentions and actual behavior.