The Effects Of Ambient Odors On Pro-environmental Behavior

The influencing factors of pro-environmental behavior have been a hot research topic in the field of pro-environmental behavior.Psychological variables related to pro-environment behavior are currently divided into cognitive psychological variables and emotional variables.However,this study intends to explore the influence of ambient odor,an external variable,on the pro-environment behavior.As environmental smell can affect cognition,emotion and behavior,.Generally speaking,positive smell can improve cognition,enhance positive emotion and promote the occurrence of purchase behavior.And the odor of negative valence enhances negative emotions and leads to more moral behavior.Both positive and negative smells can positively influence the occurrence of prosocial behaviors.According to the above research background,this study adopted multivariate analysis of variance in experiment 1,which proved that compared with the neutral odor,the positive odor could bring more pro-environment behavior and positive emotion in the garbage cleaning behavior of low-cost pro-environment behavior.Negative odors can lead to more pro-environmental behavior and negative feelings about not performing that pro-environmental behavior.Using multivariate analysis of variance in experiment 2,proved that the higher costs for pro-environmental behavior of the green consumption behavior,compared to the neutral odor,the positive odor can bring more pro-environmental behavior,cognitive benefits associated with the pro-environmental behavior evaluation,positive emotional experience and improve the evaluation for the pro-environmental behavior products.AMOS was used to analyze the mediating factors of odor,positive emotion,cognitive benefit and pro-environment behavior in experiment 2,and it was found that positive emotion played a partial mediating role between odor and pro-environment behavior.Cognitive benefits play a partial mediating role between smell and pro-environment behaviorConclusion:1.Positive odor can positively influence the pro-environment behavior,no matter the high-cost pro-environment behavior or the low-cost pro-environment behavior.2.Negative odor can positively affect low-cost pro-environment behavior and their negative emotion.3.Positive odor can positively influence the positive emotion of related pro-environment behavior,no matter the high-cost pro-environment behaviors or the low-cost pro-environment behaviors.4.The cognitive benefits of high cost pro-environment behaviors are positively affected by positive odor and negatively affected by the negative odor.5.Positive emotions play a mediating role between odor and pro-environment behavior.6.Cognitive benefits play a mediating role between odor and pro-environment behavior.