Why We Say Yes to Green Products but Buy Something Else

Every year, surveys around the world deliver the same encouraging headline: consumers say they care about the environment, express positive attitudes toward green products, and fully intend to make sustainable choices. And every year, checkout data tells a different story. Shoppers who claimed they would buy the eco-friendly option walk out with the conventional one instead. Behavioral scientists call this stubborn discrepancy the green gap, and it has resisted decades of awareness campaigns, eco-labeling schemes, and corporate sustainability pledges. A new study published in Discover Sustainability by Yaser Sobhanifard and Reza Molavi of Iran University of Science and Technology argues that the missing piece of the puzzle is not attitude or awareness at all, but risk — specifically, the fears and doubts that consumers quietly attach to green products before they commit to a purchase.

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