When Scarcity Mind-set Promotes Prosocial Behaviours: A Waste Reduction

• Main Authors: Wang, Xue, Dai, Xianchi, Si, Kao
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Consumers; Motivation; Scarcity
• ISSN: 0098-9258

Experiences of scarcity are ubiquitous and have profound influences on consumers (Hamilton, Mittal, Shah, Thompson, and Griskevičius 2018). When consumers experience shortages of resources relative to their needs, they draw attention to the limited resources, focus on self and reduce spending resources on others. Therefore, scarcity disposes consumers towards selfish acquisitions of resources and decreases their prosocial tendency (Holland, Silva, and Mace 2012; Petersen, Aaroe, Jensen, and Curry 2014; Roux, Goldsmith, and Bonezzi 2015). The current research reexamines the relationship between scarcity and prosociality. We contend that the motivation to conserve resources is an important psychological reality that accompanies scarcity (Haushofer and Fehr 2014; Shah, Shafir, and Mullainathan 2015). When a waste concern is present, the increased waste reduction motivation might override the self-interest motivation and lead consumers to conserve resources even when doing so benefits others at a cost of self, a tendency that manifests . We further propose the type of cost (i.e., money versus time) to be a moderator. Monetary cost is generally more countable and construed more concretely than temporal cost (Macdonnell and White, 2015; Okada and Hoch 2004). Besides, money is the major and primary resource to cope with scarcity because it can exchange for many other types of resources. Thus, consumers with scarcity mindset might be more sensitive to monetary cost than to temporal cost. Consequently, scarcity mind-set might promote altruistic behavior when it takes time to reduce waste, but less so (or even reversed) when it takes money. Seven studies examine the hypotheses. Before the focal studies, we tested the association between scarcity and waste reduction motivation by the World Values Survey (WVS; Inglehart et al. 2014) and found that relative income negatively predicted intentions of saving resources, b = -.02, p = .001, 95%CI = (-.0341, -.0094), suggesting a positive relation between scarcity and intentions of saving resources. Studies 1 to 3 tested whether activating scarcity mind-set would increase the motivation to reduce waste and protect resources. Study 1 manipulated scarcity mind-set by asking participants to recall a personal experience that they did not have enough resources (Roux et al. 2015), which was also used in the following Studies 2 to 5. Afterwards, participants joined a taste-drink task and received two cups of lemon tea, one was larg