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The addition of environmentally friendly items to conventional items sometimes leads people to believe that the carbon footprint of the entire set decreases rather than increases. This negative footprint illusion is supposedly underpinned by an averaging bias: people base environmental impact estimates not on the total impact of items but on their average. Here, we found that the illusion’s magnitude increased with the addition of a greater number of “green” items when the number of conventional items remained constant (Studies 1 and 2), supporting the averaging-bias account. We challenged this account by testing what happens when the number of items in the conventional and “green” categories vary while holding the ratio between the two categories constant (Study 3). At odds with the averaging-bias account, the magnitude of the illusion increased as the category size increased, revealing a category-size bias, and raising questions about the interplay between these biases in the illusion.

People consistently act in ways that harm the environment, even when believing their actions are environmentally friendly. A case in point is a biased judgment termed the negative footprint illusion, which arises when people believe that the addition of “eco-friendly” items (e.g., environmentally certified houses) to conventional items (e.g., standard houses), reduces the total carbon footprint of the whole item-set, whereas the carbon footprint is, in fact, increased because eco-friendly items still contribute to the overall carbon footprint. Previous research suggests this illusion is the manifestation of an “averaging-bias.” We present two studies that explore whether people’s susceptibility to the negative footprint illusion is associated with individual differences in: (i) environment-specific reasoning dispositions measured in terms of compensatory green beliefs and environmental concerns; or (ii) general analytic reasoning dispositions measured in terms of actively open-minded thinking, avoidance of impulsivity and reflective reasoning (indexed using the Cognitive Reflection Test; CRT). A negative footprint illusion was demonstrated when participants rated the carbon footprint of conventional buildings combined with eco-friendly buildings (Study 1 and 2) and conventional cars combined with eco-friendly cars (Study 2). However, the illusion was not identified in participants’ ratings of the carbon footprint of apples (Study 1 and 2). In Studies 1 and 2, environment-specific dispositions were found to be unrelated to the negative footprint illusion. Regarding reflective thinking dispositions, reduced susceptibility to the negative footprint illusion was only associated with actively open-minded thinking measured on a 7-item scale (Study 1) and 17-item scale (Study 2). Our findings provide partial support for the existence of a negative footprint illusion and reveal a role of individual variation in reflective reasoning dispositions in accounting for a limited e

Past research has consistently shown that carbon footprint estimates of a set of conventional and more environmentally friendly items in combination tend to be lower than estimates of the conventional items alone. This ‘negative footprint illusion’ is a benchmark for the study of how cognitive heuristics and biases underpin environmentally significant behavior. However, for this to be a useful paradigm, the findings must also be reliable and valid, and an understanding of how methodological details such as response time pressure influence the illusion is necessary. Past research has cast some doubt as to whether the illusion is obtained when responses are made on a ratio/quantitative scale and when a within-participants design is used. Moreover, in past research on the negative footprint illusion, participants have had essentially as much time as they liked to make the estimates. It is yet unknown how time pressure influences the effect. This paper reports an experiment that found the effect when participants were asked to estimate the items’ emissions in kilograms CO2 (a ratio scale) under high and under low time pressure, using a within-participants design. Thus, the negative footprint illusion seems to be a reliable and valid phenomenon that generalizes across methodological considerations and is not an artifact of specific details in the experimental setup.

As an essential and indispensable contributor to pollinating the world's crops and plants, the honey bee is key to the sustainability of humans' and our ecosystems' continued survival. Following in the footsteps of the companies TietoEvry and Beelabs project, this report also works towards monitoring bees during their daily activities. This project aims to investigate the feasibility of using wireless, battery-driven devices inside beehives to detect the sound of bees using machine learning for edge devices. Beelab has focused on measurements in and around the beehive regarding weight, temperature, barometric pressure and humidity. Sound analysis is still in its infancy with few finished working alternatives; therefore, this project will focus on the sound attribute by implementing machine learning and classification algorithms and applying it to a prototype—the progress is thoroughly documented in this report. The device records a snippet of sound and prepares to send it over a wireless transmission medium. By streamlining the code and optimizing the hardware, the device runs continuously for a month using a small, cheap battery.

Moral spillover occurs when a morally loaded behavior becomes associated with another source. In the current paper, we addressed whether the moral motive behind causing CO2 emissions spills over on to how much people think is needed to compensate for the emissions. Reforestation (planting trees) is a common carbon-offset technique. With this in mind, participants estimated the number of trees needed to compensate for the carbon emissions from vehicles that were traveling with various moral motives. Two experiments revealed that people think larger carbon offsets are needed to compensate for the emissions when the emissions are caused by traveling for immoral reasons, in comparison with when caused by traveling for moral reasons. Hence, moral motives influence peoples judgments of carbon-offset requirements even though these motives have no bearing on what is compensated for. Moreover, the effect was insensitive to individual differences in carbon literacy and gender and to the unit (kilograms or tons) in which the CO2 emissions were expressed to the participants. The findings stress the role of emotion in how people perceive carbon offsetting.

The way by which various sources of external information interact in their effects on judgment is rarely investigated. Here, we report two experiments that examine how two sources of external information—an anchor (a reference price) and an eco-label—influence judgments of an objective fact (product price) and a subjective preference (willingness-to-pay for the product). Participants’ price judgments were drawn in the direction of the anchor point, whereas the eco-label resulted in higher judgments of objective fact (Experiment 1) but did not influence subjective preference (Experiment 2). Interestingly, the eco-label seemed to strengthen the effect of the high anchor in judgments of objective fact. Further, participants with higher environmental concern answered a higher price on the subjective preference questions when they received a high anchor, as well as a lower price when they received a low anchor in comparison to the low environmental concern group. This study demonstrates that various external information sources can strengthen each other’s effects on consumer belief about products, while the effects are weaker for consumers’ preferences. The implications of the results for decision making are discussed.

People’s belief that one or more environmentally friendly items that are added to a set of conventional items can reduce the total environmental impact of these items (the negative footprint illusion) could lead to unwanted environmental consequences. An averaging bias seems to underpin this illusion: people make their estimates based on the average of the environmental impact produced by the items rather than the accumulated sum. We report four studies that used various priming manipulations to explore whether people’s preoccupation to think in terms of an average can be eliminated by fostering a summative mindset. The results demonstrate that participants avoid succumbing to the negative footprint illusion when the critical judgment task is preceded by tasks that engender a summation judgment. Our evidence indicates that the negative footprint illusion can be tempered when a primed concept (summation) is used adaptively on subsequent judgments, thereby correcting for bias in environmental judgments.

Recent years have seen a marked increase in carbon emissions despite pledges made by the international community at the Paris Accord in 2015 to reduce fossil fuel production and consumption. Rebound effects could contribute to this phenomenon as, in which attempts to curb carbon emissions might have inadvertently led to an upswing in fossil fuel usage. The present study hypothesizes that rebound effects are driven by a misapplication of compensatory balancing heuristics, with the unintended outcome of producing inaccurate estimates of the environmental impact of “green” or environmentally friendly labelled products or behaviors. The present study therefore aims to investigate the relationship between participants’ degree of compensatory thinking (e.g., “Recycling compensates for driving a car”) and their susceptibility to the Negative Footprint Illusion, a widely replicated phenomenon demonstrating that the presence of “green” products biases carbon footprint estimations. One hundred and twelve participants were asked to complete a 15-item Compensatory Green Beliefs scale and to estimate the total carbon footprint of a set of 15 conventional houses, followed by a set that included 15 “green” houses in addition to 15 conventional houses. Results indicated that participants, on average, believed that the "green" houses were carbon neutral, and that susceptibility to the Negative Footprint Illusion was predicted by performance on the Compensatory Green Beliefs scale. This is the first study confirming that individual differences in cognitive processes (i.e., Compensatory Green Beliefs) are indeed related to inaccurate estimates of “green” products, providing a foundation for further investigation of the influence of “green” and compensatory beliefs on carbon footprint estimates.

When 'environmentally friendly' items are added to a set of conventional items, people report that the total set will have a lower environmental impact even though the actual impact increases. One hypothesis is that this "negative footprint illusion" arises because people, who are susceptible to the illusion, lack necessary knowledge of the item's actual environmental impact, perhaps coupled with a lack of mathematical skills. The study reported here addressed this hypothesis by recruiting participants ('experts') from a master's program in energy systems, who thus have bachelor degrees in energy-related fields including academic training in mathematics. They were asked to estimate the number of trees needed to compensate for the environmental burden of two sets of buildings: one set of 150 buildings with conventional energy ratings and one set including the same 150 buildings but also 50 'green' (energy-efficient) buildings. The experts reported that less trees were needed to compensate for the set with 150 conventional and 50 'green' buildings compared to the set with only the 150 conventional buildings. This negative footprint illusion was as large in magnitude for the experts as it was for a group of novices without academic training in energy-related fields. We conclude that people are not immune to the negative footprint illusion even when they have the knowledge necessary to make accurate judgments.

Previous research has shown that merely calling an indoor environment environmentally certified will make people favor that environment over a conventional alternative. In this paper we explore whether this effect depends on participants deliberately comparing the two environments, and whether different reasons behind the certification influence the magnitude of the effect. In Experiment 1, participants in a between-subjects design assigned higher comfort ratings to an indoor environment that had been labeled "environmentally certified" in comparison with the exact same indoor environment that was unlabeled, suggesting that the effect arises even when participants do not compare the two environments when making their estimates. The results from Experiment 2 indicate that climate change mitigation (as the reason for the certification) is a slightly better trigger of the effect compared to climate change adaptation. The results suggest that studies on psychological effects of "green" buildings should experimentally control for the influence from participants' judgmental biases.

Introduction: Just calling a food product or an artifact “eco-friendly” is enough to make individuals believe that the products have superior features compared to an objectively identical alternative labeled conventional (e.g., Sörqvist et al. 2013). Research show that occupants are more comfortable in “green” buildings (Kim, Hwang, Lee & Corser, 2015), if these self-reports are influenced by the “green” label are still unclear. The purpose of this paper was to extend this eco-label effect even further, namely to buildings. Participants in the environmentally framed condition rated the room as more comfortable to the room framed as conventional. Practical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed. Theoretical background: Research in environmental psychology have shown that people assign higher taste-ratings to a food-product that is labeled as eco-friendly compared to a conventional alternative, even though the two products are in fact identical. This preference bias has been shown with various products. For example coffee (Sörqvist et al. 2013), bananas (Sörqvist et al. 2015), wine (Wiedmann, 2014), and lamps (Sörqvist, Haga, Holmgren & Hansla, 2015). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there exist a preference bias for “green” compared to conventional buildings Method: Thirty five university students participated in the study (16 women), with a mean age of 28.06 years (SD = 10.22), ranging from 18 years to 62 years. The study took place in two rooms, the participants were told that one room was run by an environmentally certified system, whereas the other room was run by a conventional system. They were then asked to assign comfort ratings to both rooms. A within design will be used with informational framing as the independent variable. The dependent variable was general comfort. Results: The participants perceived the "green" room (M = 6.11, SD = 2.06) as more comfortable than the "conventional" room (M = 5.40, SD =

As the demand for eco-friendly food—produced without pesticides and environmentally harmful chemicals—increases, the need to develop genetically modified (GM) organisms that are more resistant to parasites and other environmental crop threats may increase. Because of this, products labeled both “eco-friendly” and “genetically modified” could become commonly available on the market. In this paper, we explore—in a Swedish and a UK sample—the consequences of combining eco-labeling and GM-labeling to judgments of taste, health consequences and willingness to pay for raisins. Participants tasted and evaluated four categories of raisins (eco-labeled and GM-labeled; eco-labeled; GM-labeled; and neither eco-labeled nor GM-labeled). The results suggest that there is a cost associated with adding a GM-label to an eco-labeled product: The GM-label removes the psychological benefits of the eco-label. This negative effect of the GM-label was larger among Swedish participants in comparison with UK participants, because the magnitude of the positive effect of the eco-label was larger in the Swedish sample and, hence, the negative effects of the GM-label became more pronounced. The pattern was somewhat different depending on judgmental dimension. The cost associated with adding a GM-label was larger in estimates of taste and health than in estimates of willingness to pay, at least for the Swedish sample. The roles of individual differences in attitudes, environmental concern and socially desirable responding in relation to the label effects are discussed.

Visiting or viewing nature environments can have restorative psychological effects, while exposure to the built environment typically has less positive effects. A classic view is that this difference in restorative potential of nature and built environments depends on differences in the intrinsic characteristics of the stimuli. In addition, an evolutionary account is often assumed whereby restoration is believed to be a hardwired response to nature’s stimulus-features. Here, we propose the novel hypothesis that the restorative effects of a stimulus do not entirely depend on the stimulus-features per se, but also on the meaning that people assign to the stimulus. Participants conducted cognitively demanding tests prior to and after a brief pause. During the pause, the participants were exposed to an ambiguous sound consisting of pink noise with white noise interspersed. Participants in the “nature sound-source condition” were told that the sound originated from a nature scene with a waterfall; participants in the “industrial sound-source condition” were told that the sound originated from an industrial environment with machinery; and participants in the “control condition” were told nothing about the sound origin. Self-reported mental exhaustion showed that participants in the nature sound-source condition were more psychologically restored after the pause than participants in the industrial sound-source condition. One potential interpretation of the results is that restoration from nature experiences depends on learned, positive associations with nature; not only on hardwired responses shaped by evolution.

Some studies suggest that environmentally certified buildings may have psychological benefits for their occupants (e.g., higher perceived overall comfort and greater work place satisfaction). In my coming paper, I aim to investigate whether people will perceive a room as more comfortable and satisfactory following information regarding a bogus environmentally certification of the building in which the room are situated. The research procedure will consist of two conditions (i.e., one experimental and one control condition) and two measurements. Both conditions will first receive a questionnaire before a lecture regarding a survey exploring how students perceive the indoor environment in a classroom in which they are in, the questionnaire will also contain questions about environmental concern and pro-environmental. One month later the participants in the experimental condition will receive the exact same questionnaire but with complementary information telling them that the room has in the past month undergone certain interventions leading to an environmental certification, whereas the control condition will receive the exact same questionnaire again. The hypothesis is that the participants in the experimental condition will perceive the room as more comfortable compared to the control condition. An intriguing research question is if the participants in the experimental condition will score higher on pro-environmental behavior intentions and on environmental concern compared to the control condition, if this is the case it will have implications for previous studies showing that occupants of environmentally certified buildings have greater environmental concern compared to occupants in conventional buildings. Finally, the results will both methodologically and theoretically deepen the understanding about why “green” buildings can have psychological benefits.

Consumers believe that “eco-labeled” products taste better, which, at least in part, may be an effect of the label. The purpose of the current series of experiments was to examine some mechanisms and limits of this eco-label effect. In Experiment 1, an eco-label effect of similar magnitude was found for taste ratings of both conventional and organic bananas. Experiment 2 showed eco-label effects for a wider range of judgmental dimensions (i.e., health, calories, vitamins/minerals, mental performance, and willingness to pay) and the effect was about the same in magnitude for judgments of grapes and raisins. Experiment 3, with water as the tasted product, found no eco-label effect on judgments of taste, calories and vitamins/minerals, but an effect on willingness to pay, judgments of health benefits and judgments of mental performance benefits. Experiments 2 and 3 also included questionnaires on social desirability traits, schizotypal traits and pro-environmental consumer traits. The last was the strongest predictor of the eco-label effect amongst the three. In all, the eco-label effect is a robust phenomenon, but depends on interactions between product type and judgmental dimension. Implications for several accounts of the effect are discussed.

People tend to idealize eco-labeled products, but can eco-labeling have consequences for performance To address this question, 48 university students were asked to undertake a color discrimination task adjacent to a desktop lamp that was either labeled “environmentally friendly” or “conventional” (although they were identical). The light of the lamp labeled “environmentally friendly” was rated as more comfortable. Notably, task performance was also better when the lamp was labeled “environmentally friendly”. Individual differences in environmental concern, but not pro-environmental consumer behavior and social desirability indexes, were related to the magnitude of the eco-label effect on performance. Whilst some previous studies have shown similar placebo-like effects of eco-labels on subjective ratings, this is the first study to show an eco-label effect for artifacts in the built environment on performance, and the first study to relate this effect to environmental concern. Psychological mechanisms that may underpin the eco-label effects are discussed.