How social interaction shapes habitual and occasional low-carbon consumption behaviors: Evidence from ten cities in China

Low-carbon consumption behaviors (LCBs) are pivotal for alleviating climate change caused by human activities. Most current studies rarely distinguish between different types of LCBs, and fail to capture the multifaceted effects of social interaction and its situational boundaries on individual behavior. To address this drawback, this study divides LCBs into habitual low-carbon consumption behavior (HLCB) and occasional low-carbon consumption behavior (OLCB), and detects the effects of social interaction, attitudinal uncertainty, and knowledge distance on both behavior categories using data from 2139 residents of ten cities in China. The instrumental variable method, gender-based test, and data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) 2020 are used to check the robustness of the results. Although the findings indicate a positive linear relationship between social interaction and HLCB, they also indicate an inverted U-shaped association between social interaction and OLCB. Attitudinal uncertainty not only positively moderates the association between social interaction and HLCB but also reinforces the inverted U-shaped association between social interaction and OLCB. Furthermore, knowledge distance steepens the association between social interaction and OLCB, while no moderating effect is found between social interaction and HLCB. This study addresses an understudied component of the multifaceted effects of social interaction and sheds light on targeted policy schemes for different types of LCBs.