Pathways to Sustainable Choices: A Sequential Mediation Analysis of Emotional and Behavioral Drivers Among E- Commerce Consumers

Abstract

This research effectively contributes the TPB through integrating the moral emotions such as the eco-shame, environmental concern as well as the environmental guilt to elucidate sustainable-fashion-consumption in e-commerce context. The traditional TPB constructs-such as the subjective norms, attitude and perceived-behavioral control somehow fail to completely capture the moral and emotional dimensions that persuade the pro-environmental behavior. This study hence, scrutinizes how the study variables actually interact throughout the emotional cognitive apparatuses to contour the behavioral-purchase intentions (BPI) towards the sustainable fashion. A primary data was collected quantitatively through a survey from 406 online fashion consumers in Lahore, Pakistan to test the four sequential hypotheses using the Hayes’ PROCESS Macro-Model 6. All the four analysis examined how the eco-shame (ES), sustainable-consumption attitude (SCA), subjective-norms (SN) and the perceived-behavioral control (PBC) influence the purchase intentions through the environmental-concern (EC) and the environmental guilt (EG). The findings divulge a clear moral-emotional sequence: ES/SCA/SN/PBC heightens the EC then EC evokes the EG and EG drives the BPI. This sequence of all the variables in the mediations paths sustains the conjectural argument that the moral-emotions conduit the cognitive-behavioral gap in the sustainable choices. The research enriches the TPB frame-work through highlighting empirical-evidence that the sustainable-consumption is not exclusively driven through coherent attitudes but by the emotional accountability and moral cognition as well.

Keywords: Eco-shame, Sustainable Consumption Attitude, Subjective Norms, Perceived Behavioral Control, Environmental Concern, Environmental Guilt, Behavioral Purchase Intention, TBP