The interactive effetcs of emotion and message framing in reducing single-use plastic consumption: The Neglected role of emotions

Despite today's growing awareness of sustainability, around 67 million plastic bottles are thrown away every day worldwide. The properties of plastics that make them highly useful materials for our daily lives make it impossible for them to completely break down in nature, and this makes plastic waste that cannot be recycled a vital problem for the planet. Reducing consumption at the source has become one of the best strategies to combat plastic pollution, especially as single-use plastics fail the reuse, recycling, recovery, and disposal steps of the Waste Management Hierarchy. In response to the plastic waste problem, this study will investigate the separate effects and interactive roles of emotion (disgust vs. sadness) and message framing (gain vs. loss) in reducing plastic consumption, as well as the moderating effect of perceived psychological distance. Emotions will be manipulated in relation to the message in line with Nabi's Cognitive Functional Model. The study has unique values as there is limited previous research on how emotions can interact with message framing, these studies have only focused on mood or non-message related emotions, there has never been a study in this context in the field of sustainable consumption, and disgust emotion will be investigated for the first time in this context. It is expected that the loss frame will have a significant effect on the intention to reduce the use of single-use plastics compared to the gain frame (Study 1), disgust will have a significant effect on donation behavior and amount compared to sadness (Study 2), and disgust and loss frame message matching will have a significant effect on the choice of glass bottled water compared to other versions (Study 3). It is also predicted that the moderating effect of psychological distance perception will be observed in all models.