Trust, Not Hype: What Really Drives Generation Z’s Green Buying Intentions

Generation Z has grown up surrounded by climate messaging, eco-labels, and sustainability hashtags, yet the psychological machinery that turns all that exposure into an actual intention to buy green products has remained surprisingly murky. A new study published in Frontiers in Sustainability by Kodiarasi Muthulingam and E. Nixon Amirtharaj of SRM Institute of Science and Technology offers one of the most detailed statistical dissections to date of how two very different forces—an inner sense of consumer responsibility and the flood of sustainability content on social media—shape young consumers’ willingness to purchase sustainable products. Their findings, based on 347 young adults in three major Indian cities, deliver a result that few marketers will want to hear: the buzz on social media may build trust, but it does not reliably translate into purchase intentions. What matters far more is something harder to manufacture—a consumer’s own internalized sense of environmental responsibility, working through the psychology of trust.

The research is anchored in a classic framework from environmental psychology known as Stimulus–Organism–Response, or S–O–R, first proposed by Mehrabian and Russell in the 1970s to explain how environmental cues trigger internal emotional states that then drive behavior. The Indian team extended this model into the digital marketplace. In their formulation, two antecedent conditions feed into the consumer’s internal evaluation stage. The first is Consumer Social Responsibility, an enduring personal orientation reflecting a person’s recognition that their consumption choices carry social and environmental consequences. The second is Sustainability-Related Social Media Influence, the informational and social pressure arising from sustainability content, recommendations, and discussions encountered on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Both stimuli, the researchers hypothesized, would shape two internal evaluations—Green Trust, the confidence a consumer places in environmental claims and product performance, and Green Perceived Value, the judged worth of a sustainable product’s environmental benefits relative to the sacrifices of buying it—which would in turn drive Purchase Intention.

To test this architecture, the team ran a quantitative, cross-sectional survey across Chennai, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad, targeting consumers aged 18 to 29 who used social media and had encountered sustainability-related content. Of 400 questionnaires distributed through WhatsApp groups, social media networks, university channels, and professional networks, 347 complete responses were retained, distributed almost evenly across the three cities. The sample skewed female at 59.9 percent, was dominated by undergraduates at 67.1 percent, and was heavily engaged online: Instagram was the primary platform for 32 percent of respondents, YouTube for 28 percent, and LinkedIn for 25.6 percent, with nearly a third spending three to four hours daily on social media. A pilot study with 126 respondents—excluded from the final analysis—confirmed the reliability of the measurement scales, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from 0.746 to 0.914 across the five constructs.

The analytical pipeline was rigorous. Exploratory Factor Analysis using Principal Axis Factoring with Varimax rotation produced a clean five-factor solution, with loadings ranging from 0.568 to 0.934 and no substantial cross-loadings. Confirmatory Factor Analysis then validated the measurement model with strong fit indices: a normed chi-square of 2.749, a Comparative Fit Index of 0.953, and a Root Mean Square Error of Approximation of 0.071. Reliability coefficients for all constructs exceeded the conventional 0.70 threshold, and discriminant validity was confirmed using the Fornell–Larcker criterion, with the square roots of average variance extracted for each construct exceeding all inter-construct correlations. Harman’s single-factor test indicated that common method bias was not a serious concern, with the first factor explaining only 27.1 percent of the variance, well below the 50 percent warning threshold.

With the measurement model secured, the researchers turned to Structural Equation Modeling to test the hypothesized pathways, employing bias-corrected bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples to evaluate indirect effects without assuming normality. The structural model fit the data acceptably, with a chi-square to degrees of freedom ratio of 3.729, a CFI of 0.926, and an RMSEA of 0.079. The results revealed a striking asymmetry between the two antecedents. Consumer Social Responsibility was significantly and positively associated with both Green Trust (β = 0.264, p < 0.001) and Green Perceived Value (β = 0.174, p = 0.008). Sustainability-Related Social Media Influence, by contrast, was positively associated with Green Trust (β = 0.130, p = 0.045) but showed no significant relationship with Green Perceived Value (β = −0.079, p = 0.254). In other words, scrolling past sustainability content may convince young consumers that green products are credible, but it does not make them value those products more.

The pathways to purchase intention proved equally revealing. Green Trust showed a significant positive association with Purchase Intention (β = 0.256, p < 0.001), confirming that confidence in environmental claims reduces uncertainty and strengthens the willingness to buy. But Green Perceived Value produced an unexpected and statistically significant negative association with Purchase Intention (β = −0.133, p = 0.027)—a result that contradicts the predominantly positive relationships reported in prior literature. The researchers probed this anomaly carefully. The zero-order correlation between the two variables was weak and non-significant (r = −0.040, p = 0.462), yet the negative coefficient emerged robustly in the multivariate model, a pattern consistent with statistical suppression. Collinearity diagnostics showed no problematic multicollinearity, with tolerance values ranging from 0.710 to 0.855 and variance inflation factors all below 1.5. The authors caution that this negative relationship is an empirical finding requiring investigation rather than a settled causal interpretation, and they explicitly note that their study does not directly test the mechanisms underlying it.

The mediation analysis, the statistical heart of the study, delivered the most consequential verdict. Consumer Social Responsibility exerted a significant indirect effect on Purchase Intention through Green Trust (β = 0.068, 95% bias-corrected confidence interval [0.019, 0.095], p < 0.001), and also through Green Perceived Value (β = −0.023, 95% CI [−0.050, −0.001], p = 0.038), though the latter pathway operated through the negative value-to-intention link. Meanwhile, neither mediator carried a significant indirect effect from Sustainability-Related Social Media Influence to Purchase Intention: the Green Trust pathway yielded β = 0.033 (p = 0.109) and the Green Perceived Value pathway yielded β = 0.011 (p = 0.207), both statistically indistinguishable from zero. Notably, the direct paths from both antecedents to Purchase Intention were also non-significant, indicating that Consumer Social Responsibility works on purchase intentions almost entirely through the internal evaluations of trust and perceived value rather than through any direct route.

The explanatory power of the model, while modest, tells its own story. The constructs explained 11.2 percent of the variance in Green Trust, 2.6 percent in Green Perceived Value, and 8.0 percent in Purchase Intention—figures that underscore how much of sustainable purchasing psychology remains uncharted. This is not a failure of the model so much as a reminder that purchase intentions among young consumers are shaped by a vast array of factors beyond responsibility and social media exposure, including price sensitivity, product availability, habit, and cultural context. The authors are careful to frame their findings as associations consistent with the S–O–R framework rather than evidence of causal direction, given the cross-sectional design and the non-probability purposive sampling method, which may limit generalizability beyond the studied population.

For businesses targeting Generation Z, the practical implications are pointed. The findings suggest that sustainability communication should emphasize consumers’ own environmental responsibility and the credible trustworthiness of green claims, rather than assuming that a heavier volume of social media content will automatically elevate how valuable young consumers perceive sustainable products to be. Because social media influence built trust but not perceived value, and because trust—not value—was the reliable engine of purchase intention, brands may get more return from transparent, verifiable sustainability communication than from promotional messaging about environmental benefits. The unexpected negative association between Green Perceived Value and Purchase Intention adds a further caution: recognizing that a product is environmentally beneficial does not necessarily mean a young consumer intends to buy it, particularly when other considerations compete in the decision.

The study also opens clear avenues for future research. The authors call for longitudinal or experimental designs to untangle the direction of causality, including the possibility that trusting green products may itself foster a stronger sense of consumer responsibility rather than the reverse. Replication across different geographic settings, consumer groups, and sustainable-product categories would test whether the negative Green Perceived Value finding is an artifact of this particular sample or a genuine feature of how young consumers weigh environmental benefits against the sacrifices of green purchasing. The researchers also acknowledge that conducting exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses on the same sample, rather than independent datasets, is a methodological limitation that future work should address. What the study establishes firmly, however, is that in the contest for Generation Z’s green wallets, the loudest voice on the feed may matter less than the quiet conviction, formed within each consumer, that sustainable products can be trusted to deliver what they promise.

Subject of Research: The mediating roles of green trust and green perceived value in Generation Z's sustainable purchase intention

Article Title: Consumer Social Responsibility and Sustainability-Related Social Media Influence in Generation Z's sustainable purchase intention: the mediating roles of Green Trust and Green Perceived Value

Article References: Muthulingam, K., & Amirtharaj, E. N. (2026). Consumer Social Responsibility and Sustainability-Related Social Media Influence in Generation Z's sustainable purchase intention: the mediating roles of Green Trust and Green Perceived Value. Frontiers in Sustainability, 7, Article 1973593. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsus.2026.1973593

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsus.2026.1973593

Keywords: Generation Z, sustainable consumption, green trust, green perceived value, consumer social responsibility, social media influence, purchase intention, Stimulus-Organism-Response framework, structural equation modeling, green marketing, Frontiers in Sustainability, consumer behavior