Compensatory green beliefs about curtailment behavior: “Mending is better than saving for a rainy day"

There are many factors that hinder ecological sustainability, and the fact that people can develop a cognitive bias toward curtailment in environmentally friendly behaviors seems to be one of them. That is, people believe that the environmental impact of a later good curtailment behavior can compensate for the environmental impact of an initial bad environmental damage behavior, which is also called compensatory green belief. And in fact, curtailment behavior as a cure for the symptoms of environmental behavior does not have a compensatory effect. This paper builds on previous research to refine generalized environmentally friendly behaviors by exploring the compensatory green beliefs people hold about curtailment behaviors in two studies that extend from collective environmental governance (study 1) to individual environmental governance contexts (study 2). It was found that compensatory green beliefs about curtailment behavior were stable in the collective environmental governance context. In the individual environmental governance context, people hold stronger explicit compensatory green beliefs about pollution-initiated curtailment behavior, but not implicit compensatory green beliefs. Overall, people's misconceptions about environmental behavior are one of the factors that hinder ecological sustainability.