The researchers started from a well-established idea in consumer psychology: perceived risk theory. Since the 1960s, scholars have recognized that buyers do not simply weigh benefits; they also mentally simulate everything that could go wrong. A purchase can fail financially, functionally, socially, or psychologically, and the anticipation of those failures shapes decisions just as powerfully as any advertised advantage. What Sobhanifard and Molavi suspected was that green products carry an unusually heavy load of such perceived risks — risks that traditional models of sustainable consumption have tended to underestimate or ignore. If consumers hesitate at the shelf, the hesitation may have less to do with weak environmental values and more to do with a private, often unspoken calculus of what they stand to lose.

To test that idea, the team built a mixed-methods design that unfolded in three stages. First, they conducted a systematic review of the existing literature on green consumption and perceived risk, combing through prior studies to assemble a candidate list of risk factors. Second, they interviewed nine experts in the field and applied thematic analysis to those conversations, refining and expanding the list until it captured the full landscape of consumer anxieties. The result was a set of 21 distinct perceived risk factors — a far more granular taxonomy than the handful of risk categories found in classic textbooks. The factors ranged from the familiar, such as higher purchase price and doubts about product quality, to the subtle and rarely studied, such as the fear of being seen as a show-off for buying green, or the anxiety of not being able to explain a product’s environmental features to friends and family.

The third stage moved from theory to measurement. The researchers administered a structured questionnaire to 642 consumers in Iran, asking each respondent to rate, on a scale from 1 to 10, how strongly every one of the 21 factors discouraged them from purchasing green products. The questionnaire was deliberately concrete: rather than asking abstract questions about environmental concern, it asked about specific worries — whether a brand’s claims seemed believable, whether after-sales service and repairs would be adequate, whether the product might trigger health problems, whether buying it would demand extra time and effort spent comparing options and researching credentials. Respondents also reported demographic details and the share of household purchasing decisions they personally controlled, allowing the researchers to anchor their risk ratings in real shopping roles.

When the survey data came back, the team applied Exploratory Factor Analysis, a statistical technique that searches for hidden structure in a cloud of correlated variables. The analysis revealed that the 21 risk factors were not an undifferentiated list; they clustered into four underlying dimensions. The first, labeled Personal Factors, gathered the intimate, self-directed worries — including a construct the authors introduce as internal failure feeling, the anxiety, disappointment, or loss of self-esteem a buyer anticipates after a purchase goes wrong. The second dimension, Information and Trust, captured doubts about the credibility of product claims, the reliability of brands, and the honesty of green marketing, including the ever-present specter of greenwashing. The third, Environmental Assurance, reflected uncertainty about whether green products genuinely deliver on their ecological promises, from recyclable packaging to verifiable environmental performance. The fourth, Quality Expectations and Purchase Value, bundled concerns about durability, performance, limited variety, unfashionable design, and the nagging sense that a green product might simply be worse than its conventional rival.

Ranking the risks was where the study made its most distinctive methodological move. Instead of relying on regression coefficients or expert judgment alone, the researchers turned to Random Forest, a machine-learning algorithm that builds hundreds of decision trees on random subsets of the data and aggregates their predictions. Random Forest is prized for its robustness and for its ability to quantify the relative importance of each input variable, even when variables interact in nonlinear ways — exactly the situation one expects when psychological, social, and financial worries combine to influence a single purchase decision. Running the algorithm on the survey responses produced a clear hierarchy of barriers, and the six most influential risk factors emerged as internal failure feeling, unreliable information, brand distrust, additional effort, low variety and not being fashionable, and lack of reliable organizations and certifications.

Several of these findings deserve close attention. The top-ranked factor, internal failure feeling, is a novel construct in the green consumption literature, and its prominence suggests that the emotional stakes of buying green are higher than most models assume. A consumer who pays a premium for an eco-friendly product and then feels let down does not merely lose money; the authors suggest the buyer may experience a personal sense of failure, a wound to self-image that makes future green purchases even less likely. Equally striking is the weight placed on trust-related risks. Unreliable information and brand distrust ranked second and third, and the absence of credible certifications and verification organizations ranked sixth. In an environment saturated with vague environmental claims, consumers appear to be making a rational response: when they cannot verify a product’s green credentials, they default to skepticism, and skepticism kills the sale.

The remaining top barriers point to friction in the shopping experience itself. Additional effort — the extra time and energy needed to find, compare, and research green alternatives — acts as a silent tax on sustainable choices, one that conventional products do not impose. And the perception that green products offer low variety and lag behind current fashion suggests that sustainability still carries an aesthetic penalty in consumers’ minds, a stereotype that better design and marketing could directly attack. Together, the six barriers sketch a portrait of the hesitant green consumer: not indifferent to the environment, but wary of being deceived, disappointed, embarrassed, or exhausted by the act of buying responsibly.

The study’s implications extend well beyond Iran, even though its empirical base is a single national sample of 642 consumers — a limitation the authors’ framework does not erase, and one reason readers should treat the specific rankings as a hypothesis to be tested in other markets rather than a universal law. Still, the practical recipe that emerges is concrete. Policymakers could narrow the trust gap by establishing and enforcing credible certification schemes, so that a green label on a package means something a shopper can verify. Manufacturers could reduce internal failure feelings by guaranteeing performance and offering money-back protections, and could shrink the effort barrier by making green options easier to find and compare. Marketers, meanwhile, face the most delicate task: rebuilding brand credibility in a marketplace where exaggerated claims have taught consumers to doubt. The green gap, this research suggests, will not close through more appeals to conscience. It will close when buying green stops feeling like a gamble.

Subject of Research: Perceived risk factors in sustainable consumption and the green gap between consumer intentions and purchasing behavior

Article Title: Bridging the green gap through understanding the role of perceived risks in sustainable consumption decisions

Article References: Sobhanifard, Y., & Molavi, R. (2026). Bridging the green gap through understanding the role of perceived risks in sustainable consumption decisions. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04767-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04767-5

Keywords: green gap, perceived risk, sustainable consumption, green products, consumer behavior, greenwashing, Random Forest, exploratory factor analysis, brand trust, environmental psychology, green certifications, purchase decisions

The research, published in the open-access journal Heliyon by Kim Quoc Trung Nguyen of Ho Chi Minh City Open University, surveyed 375 Vietnamese online shoppers who had previously bought green or eco-friendly products over the internet. Using a statistical technique known as partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM, the study tested a single integrated model of how environmental stimuli on e-commerce platforms are converted into the intention to buy. The results, the author argues, overturn a comfortable assumption of digital marketing: that engagement with green content automatically breeds green purchasing.

The theoretical backbone of the study is the stimulus–organism–response framework, a classic model of environmental psychology that traces a causal chain from external cues to internal states to behavior. In this case, the stimuli are four features of the green e-commerce environment: green perceived value, meaning the environmental and personal benefits a consumer believes a product delivers; eco-brand credibility, the trustworthiness of a brand’s environmental claims; mobile shopping experience, the quality and usability of the shopping app itself; and platform sustainability features, such as eco-labels, green filters, and transparent environmental information. The “organism” in the middle of the chain is digital engagement behavior, the reading, commenting, sharing, and recommending of green content online. The “response” is online shopping intention.

What the model found was strikingly consistent. All four stimuli were positively and significantly associated with digital engagement, and all four were also directly associated with purchase intention. Green perceived value showed the strongest pull toward engagement, with a path coefficient of 0.334, followed closely by mobile shopping experience at 0.323 and eco-brand credibility at 0.322. Platform sustainability features, at 0.287, were also robust, and notably carried the largest direct effect on intention among the four, suggesting that visible cues like eco-labels and green filtering tools do more than invite interaction; they reduce the uncertainty that surrounds environmental claims, which consumers often cannot verify before a parcel arrives.

Digital engagement itself did predict purchase intention, but only weakly. Its direct path coefficient was a modest 0.163, with a small effect size of 0.052. In plain terms, people who read, discuss, and share green content online are somewhat more likely to intend to buy green products, but engagement alone explains little. The study interprets engagement instead as a transmission mechanism, a bridge that carries evaluations of value, trust, and experience toward intention, rather than an engine that drives purchasing by itself. The model explained 51 percent of the variance in digital engagement and a substantial 75.3 percent of the variance in online shopping intention, but the interaction terms, not the engagement pathway, accounted for much of that explanatory power.

Those interaction terms are the heart of the paper. The author tested two consumer competencies as moderators of the engagement-to-intention link: digital literacy, the ability to find, evaluate, and use online information, and environmental knowledge, the understanding of environmental facts and the ecological consequences of consumption. Both strengthened the relationship, but environmental knowledge did so more powerfully. The interaction between engagement and environmental knowledge produced an effect size of 0.810, classified as large, while the digital literacy interaction produced 0.623, also large but clearly smaller. The corresponding path coefficients were 0.453 and 0.377 respectively, both highly significant.

The simple-slope analysis makes the pattern vivid. When environmental knowledge was high, one standard deviation above the mean, the effect of engagement on intention was strongly positive, with a slope of 0.616. At average knowledge levels the slope was 0.163. But when knowledge was low, the slope turned significantly negative, at minus 0.290. The same reversal appeared for digital literacy, with slopes of 0.540, 0.163, and minus 0.214 at high, mean, and low levels. In other words, for consumers lacking these competencies, more engagement with green content was actually associated with less intention to buy, a result the author links to the elaboration likelihood model, in which the ability to process information centrally determines whether persuasion succeeds.

Why would knowledge matter more than digital skill? The author’s answer is that the two competencies operate at different levels of specificity. Digital literacy is instrumental and domain-general: it helps people navigate interfaces, assess reviews, and adapt to new apps. Environmental knowledge is value-laden and sustainability-specific: it enables consumers to judge whether a green claim is credible, to recognize greenwashing, and to align a purchase with their own environmental principles. A digitally fluent shopper can scroll effortlessly through eco-marketing without ever asking whether the claims are true. A knowledgeable shopper asks that question first, and the answer determines whether engagement ripens into a purchase.

The Vietnamese setting adds an important layer of interpretation. The country’s e-commerce market has grown among the fastest in Southeast Asia since the pandemic, with platforms such as Shopee, Lazada, Tiki, and TikTok Shop becoming mainstay shopping channels, particularly for young, mobile-first consumers. In such a market, stimulating engagement with green content is comparatively easy; the harder task is converting that engagement into sustainable purchasing, which depends on whether consumers can critically evaluate environmental information. The author cautions that in more mature green markets, where formal certification systems and established eco-labels carry more institutional weight, individual environmental knowledge may play a less dominant role, so the findings should be generalized carefully.

The practical implications are concrete. Platforms and sellers, the study suggests, should invest in transparent, specific, and consistent environmental information, including clear eco-labels and user-friendly green filters, to counter the skepticism that greenwashing breeds. They should also design digital experiences that genuinely foster engagement, since engagement remains a meaningful pathway even if it is not sufficient on its own. Most importantly, businesses and policymakers should treat consumer competencies as strategic infrastructure: educational initiatives that build environmental knowledge and digital literacy will, on this evidence, do more to convert clicks into sustainable purchases than any amount of promotional content alone. The study’s limitations, a convenience sample, cross-sectional self-reported data, and a single national context, mean the results are associative rather than causal, but the central message stands: in green e-commerce, what consumers know shapes what engagement is worth.

Subject of Research: The role of digital engagement, digital literacy, and environmental knowledge in green consumer purchase intention in Vietnamese e-commerce

Article Title: Green consumer behavior in e-commerce: The mediating role of digital engagement and the moderating effects of literacy and environmental knowledge

Article References: Nguyen, K. Q. T. (2026). Green consumer behavior in e-commerce: The mediating role of digital engagement and the moderating effects of literacy and environmental knowledge. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45511. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45511

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45511

Keywords: green consumer behavior, e-commerce, digital engagement, digital literacy, environmental knowledge, sustainable consumption, PLS-SEM, greenwashing, Vietnam, online shopping intention, eco-labels, consumer psychology

The research, conducted by Luigina Canova, Andrea Bobbio and Anna Maria Manganelli of the University of Padua, rests on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, one of the most widely used frameworks in social psychology for explaining voluntary human actions. The theory holds that a behaviour is driven by the intention to perform it, and that intention is in turn shaped by three forces: attitude, the person’s evaluative judgment of the behaviour; subjective norm, the perceived expectations of family and friends; and perceived behavioural control, the sense that one has the means and ability to act. Crucially, the theory also allows for background factors, deeper values and dispositions that feed into these beliefs without acting on behaviour directly.

The Padua team selected two such background factors for scrutiny: the perceived environmental value and the perceived health value of green products. Green personal care products in the study included shampoo, soap and deodorants made from organic farming components free of synthetic pesticides, fertilisers and genetically modified organisms, while green home care products covered laundry detergents, floor and glass cleaners and dishwashing liquids. The market context is striking. The global green personal care market is forecast to grow by 12.37 billion US dollars between 2024 and 2029, and trade in household green cleaning products rose from 5.14 billion dollars in 2023 to 5.49 billion in 2024, with further growth expected to reach 8.49 billion by 2030.

To test their extended model, the researchers ran two parallel two-wave surveys between October and December 2023, distributed through the Qualtrics platform. Roughly one hundred master’s students in psychology at the University of Padua recruited friends, relatives and acquaintances, with each participant assigned to only one of the two studies. In the first wave, respondents answered questions measuring perceived environmental and health values, attitudes, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control and intention. One month later they reported their intention again and, crucially, whether they had actually purchased green products during the intervening weeks. After attrition, the final combined sample comprised 766 adults, 68 percent of them women, with a mean age of 37 years.

The statistical machinery behind the study was rigorous. Confirmatory factor analyses of six latent constructs and twenty indicators produced good fit indices in both studies, and tests for common method variance suggested it did not distort the results. Regression analyses conducted with the PROCESS macro, using bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals based on five thousand resamples, tested the direct and indirect pathways of the model, with gender and age included as covariates. The measurement work paid off: the models explained roughly half of the variance in purchase intention in both studies, and between 24 and 28 percent of the variance in self-reported future purchasing behaviour, respectable figures for a psychological prediction of real-world action.

The results were consistent across both product categories in their broad outlines. Perceived environmental and health values each explained about a third of the variance in attitudes toward buying green products, and both fed indirectly into intention and behaviour through the classic Theory of Planned Behaviour constructs. Attitude emerged as the strongest single predictor of intention, followed by perceived behavioural control and subjective norm. But one value clearly outshone the other: perceived health value showed a stronger association with attitude, and in the personal care study it also maintained a direct link to intention, suggesting that consumers who believe green products enhance well-being are especially primed to buy them, partly independent of their general evaluation of the behaviour.

The most theoretically interesting finding concerned the notorious intention-behaviour gap. Meta-analyses across pro-environmental and health behaviours consistently show that intentions explain far more variance in themselves, around 50 percent, than behaviours do, around 30 percent. The Padua team examined whether the temporal stability of intention, measured by comparing intention scores at the two waves one month apart, moderated this gap. It did, and dramatically. For green personal care products, the effect of intention on behaviour was strongest among people whose intentions remained stable over the month, with a standardised coefficient of 0.65, compared with 0.32 among those with unstable intentions. For household products the pattern was even starker: among low-stability participants the intention-behaviour relationship was not statistically significant at all.

Not every result was symmetrical across the two product categories. Perceived behavioural control directly predicted future purchasing only for green home care products, which the authors attribute to the difficulty consumers may face in finding and recognising these items in retail settings, a market that remains smaller than that for green personal care. Demographic patterns also emerged: women expressed more favourable attitudes and stronger intentions toward green personal care products, while women and older participants reported greater perceived control over buying green household products, a pattern the researchers link to gender roles and greater familiarity with household shopping. The authors caution, however, that some indirect effects were statistically significant but small, and should be interpreted carefully.

The study is not without limitations, which the authors acknowledge candidly. The samples were convenience samples dominated by young adult women with medium-high education and income in a culturally homogeneous region of north-eastern Italy, the design was correlational, all measures were self-reported and vulnerable to social desirability bias, and the analyses were not preregistered. Still, the practical implications are concrete. Marketers should emphasise both environmental and health benefits, with certified toxicity and dermatological standards bolstering perceived health value; campaigns should engage family and friendship networks, given the weight of subjective norms; and retailers should improve availability, placement and pricing to strengthen perceived control. Above all, the findings suggest that fostering stable, protected intentions, rather than fleeting enthusiasm, may be the key to converting green goodwill into green purchases, a small but measurable step toward sustainable development goals.

Subject of Research: Psychosocial determinants, including perceived environmental and health values and intention stability, of purchasing green personal and household care products under the Theory of Planned Behaviour.

Article Title: The Purchase of Green Personal and Household Care Products: The Predictive Contribution of Perceived Environmental and Health Values and Intention Stability in the Theory of Planned Behaviour

Article References: Canova, L., Bobbio, A., & Manganelli, A. M. (2026). The Purchase of Green Personal and Household Care Products: The Predictive Contribution of Perceived Environmental and Health Values and Intention Stability in the Theory of Planned Behaviour. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00524-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00524-9

Keywords: green products, Theory of Planned Behaviour, consumer behaviour, intention-behaviour gap, intention stability, perceived health value, perceived environmental value, sustainable consumption, household care products, personal care products, environmental psychology, Italy