Explaining Green Purchase Behavior: Integrating Prosocial Environmental Attitudes, Green Consumption Values, and Environmental Knowledge

Purpose: This study aims to analyze the factors influencing green purchase behavior by integrating prosocial environmental attitudes, green consumption values, environmental knowledge, and openness to green communication into a structural model, framed within the value-action gap perspective. Method: Data were collected from 210 consumers residing in the Special Region of Yogyakarta who had purchased, or considered purchasing, environmentally friendly products at Super Indo. Respondents were recruited through an online, self-administered questionnaire distributed via social media, with screening questions applied at the outset; the data were analyzed using covariance-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) in AMOS, with bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals (5,000 resamples). Results: All six hypothesized paths were statistically significant. Green consumption values had a significant direct effect on purchase behavior, but this direct effect was relatively weak compared with its combined indirect effect through environmental knowledge and openness to green communication, indicating that the value-action gap observed in this study is partial rather than complete. Among the direct predictors of purchase behavior, environmental knowledge and openness to green communication showed overlapping confidence intervals, so neither can be confirmed as reliably stronger than the other based on the present data. Implications & Recommendations: These findings suggest that environmental knowledge and openness to green communication are both important mechanisms for strengthening consumers' green purchase behavior, operating in parallel alongside the direct effect of values. Theoretically, this study does not claim to extend the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) or the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) framework, since the core constructs of both theories are not modeled here; instead, both frameworks are treated as explanatory traditions whose limitations motivate a respecification of the value-action gap mechanism, positioning cognitive and communicative dimensions as parallel pathways within a single framework. Contribution & Value Added: The study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that environmental knowledge and green communication openness operate as parallel, empirically distinguishable mechanisms linking environmental values to actual purchasing behavior, and by providing evidence that the value-action gap in this setting is partial: values are translated into behavior, but that translation is stronger when accompanied by adequate cognitive and communicative conditions.