How do carbon footprints affect our decisions?

Political regulation of business  activities is often presented as the primary instrument to fight the climate crisis. Ultimately however, all economic activity is guided by consumer decisions because any business that loses consumers’ support (for instance, because of its unsustainable business model) will cease its activities rather sooner than later. Therefore, interventions aimed at nudging consumer decisions might be the most effective way forward.
Providing consumers with information about a product’s or their personal carbon footprint currently is a hotly debated approach to guide consumers  toward more sustainable decisions.  However, neither the behavioral nor the cognitive consequences of informing consumers about the carbon footprint of their decisions are sufficiently understood.
Generally, the carbon footprints of western consumers are  too high if global warming shall be limited to an average temperature increase of about 1.5° by 2050. While some argue that providing information about carbon footprints will increase the demand for less carbon-intensive alternatives, we assume that this information  will first of all trigger self-relevant emotions, such as guilt. Arguably, this emotional response might translate into a change of behavior, but it is also possible that consumers will change their cognition instead. Specifically, consumers might attempt to avert negative emotions by changing their beliefs, attitudes or attributions as defensive reactions of their “psychological immune system”. That is, consumers might attempt to restore cognitive consistency  by changing their beliefs and attitudes about the climate crisis. For instance, an increased skepticism regarding the trend, attribution, impact or the capability for human mitigation of climate change might alleviate negative emotions elicited by the own behavior (or the associated carbon footprint). Similarly, increased guilt might lead to an attribution of responsibility to other economic actors (i.e., politics and businesses) in order to reduce the negative emotional experience.
In this research project we are conducting a series of behavioral experiments to investigate the psychological processes by which carbon footprints affect emotional responses, attitudes and beliefs about the climate crisis, perceived responsibility of the consumers, and the willingness to engage in mitigative action. The results will shed light on the conditions under which information about carbon footprints may lead to more sustainable consumer decisions and when and how providing such kind of information may backfire.