How cultural values and anticipated guilt matter in Chinese residents’ intention of low carbon consuming behavior

Effectively triggering residents’ intrinsic motivation of low carbon consuming behaviors and mobilizing public participation in low carbon practices are important parts of China’s carbon emission reduction goal. In this study, anticipated guilt is introduced into model of the Theory of Planned Behavior to compensate for neglect of emotional factors. Meanwhile, cultural values are taken as antecedent variables of the extended model to further explore the driving mechanism of residents’ intention of low carbon consuming behavior. By establishing structural equation model and using Mplus7.4 to analyze the data of 848 questionnaires from Jiangsu Province, it is found that: (1) when incorporated into the model of Theory of Planned Behavior, anticipated guilt has a positive and direct impact on intention of low carbon consuming behavior along with attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control; (2) attitude, perceived behavioral control and anticipated guilt play a positive and parallel multiple mediating role between collectivist value and intention of low carbon consuming behavior; (3) attitude and anticipated guilt play parallel multiple mediating role between man-to-nature orientation value and intention of low carbon consuming behavior. Among them, attitude plays a positive mediating role and anticipated guilt plays a negative mediating role. The present study provides empirical evidence for the effect mechanism of cultural values and emotions on the intention of low carbon consuming behavior, thus providing new ideas to mobilize the public’s participation in low carbon consuming behaviors.