System Justification, Environmental Perceptions and Sustainable Behaviour in Sweden

Abstract: Consumers’ knowledge that unsustainable consumption has a negative effect on the environment does not hinder their engagement in unsustainable consumption patterns. Applying system justification theory, it was of interest to investigate its impact on Swedish citizens’ attitudes and behaviours related to sustainable consumption. This study intended to discover why Swedish consumers do not always engage in pro-environmental behaviours. An online questionnaire was composed to measure levels of consumer habits, environmental concern, system justifying tendencies, competence and autonomy support, and identification with the state among Swedish consumers. To investigate the hypothesis that Swedish consumers hold high misconceptions of what sustainability is, participants’ open-ended answers were compared to the Brundtland definition of sustainability. All proposed associations were explored using ANOVA, correlation analysis and regression analysis. System justification tendencies was, as hypothesised, associated with higher levels of identification with the state. The hypothesized positive relationship between system justifying tendencies and consumer habits was not significant. Neither was the proposed impact of system justification tendencies on consumer behaviour. Findings showed that Swedish consumers hold relatively large misconceptions of what sustainable consumption is. Also, levels of environmental concern, competence support and gender were found to be good predictors of consumer behaviour in the current study. Implications with these findings and limitations with the study are discussed.