Analytical or Emotional? Which Stimulates Greater Sustainable Travel Intention?

Climate change is a global problem and transportation is a major contributor to it. In response to that problem, information on transportation generated carbon dioxide (CO2) information on transportation is being provided to the public to aid with informed decision-making. Choice experiments have found that CO2 information given as a mass could influence choice. However, other research suggests that CO2 information presented as mass is not fully understood and that how the information is presented, the format, affects interpretation. If a format can affect understanding and interpretation, might it then affect intention (and choice) to perform sustainable travel? It can be argued that without context, it would be difficult to interpret CO2 information presented as mass with respect to sustainable levels. Information context provided through formats can highlight some aspects of the information to influence intention and choice. It could affect decisions in an analytical or emotional manner. If a format uses context that performs better in an analytical task, does it follow that it would have greater impact on influencing intention? Or might a format that includes emotional context result in stronger intention? This research examined how people’s behavioral intention responses for car use varied by three different contextualized formats (carbon budget, tree-equivalent, and earth-equivalent) with varying analytical and emotional contexts in comparison to responses based purely on CO2 information presented as a mass without direct context.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADC70(2) Climate Change.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Waygood, E O D
  • Avineri, Erel
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2013-1-13 to 2013-1-17
• Date: 2013

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 15p
• Monograph Title: TRB 92nd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Automobile travel; Carbon dioxide; Decision making; Emotions; Information dissemination; Public information programs; Sustainable transportation; Travel behavior
• Subject Areas: Environment; Highways; I15: Environment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01474127
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 13-2872
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 28 2013 11:40AM