| Every consumer knows that the Earth’s food,water,and other resources are in short supply and need to be used sparingly.However,according to the Food Waste Index 2021 report released by the United Nations,food waste is common and serious among consumers around the world.In addition to food,the water tap in daily life when no one uses water,light bulbs turn off all night when no one is in use and other phenomena also show that people waste water and electricity resources.However,resource conservation concerns the national economy and people’s livelihood,and the well-being of the next generation.Therefore,it has become a hot topic in consumer behavior research in recent years to explore what factors can affect consumers’ resource-saving/non-saving intention and behavior.But so far,there is a factor neglected by predecessors and is very common in life,that is,the visual design of the resource-saving signs.In everyday life,some save signs pack the texts interstitial very compactly,while others pack the texts interstitial very spaciously.Whether saving the compactness of the texts interstitial in the resource-saving signs has different persuasive effects for consumers? Based on this problem,this paper will explore the influence of texts interstitial on consumers’ resource-saving/non-saving intention and the internal mechanism behind it.Based on previous studies on gap elements,perceived persuasion strength,and resource non-saving intention,this paper established a research framework on the influence of texts interstitial in resource-saving prompt signs on consumers’ resourcenon-saving intention,and tested the research framework through 5 studies,including 1field experiment and 4 laboratory experiments.Among them,study 1,study 3a,study3 b and study 4 are laboratory experiments.Study 2 is a field experiment.First,studies1 and study 2 were designed to test H1.In Study 1,the control group was included to explore whether the spacious interstitial or the compact interstitial was driving the main effect of this paper.The results showed that the spacious interstitial(compared with the compact interstitial)increased consumers’ intention of not saving water resources.At the same time,study 1 also excludes the influence of texts prompt texts on the research conclusion of this paper.Study 2 manipulated the texts interstitial of the resource-saving signs in a real field and found people’s non-saving behaviors of food resources in the field.Secondly,as a boost to study 1 and study 2,study 3a and 3b tested the replicability of the conclusions of Studies 1 and 2 through the resource substitution scenario.Meanwhile,Study 3a also examines the mediating effect of perceived persuasion strength and exclude other competing mediators to verify H2.Finally,study 4 examined whether consumers’ attention has made diversion plays a moderate role,and provided a basis for H3 and H4.This paper explores the influence of the compactness of the texts interstitial on consumers’ resource-non-saving intention,finds out the " spacious interstitial--no resource-saving" effect,and explores the internal psychological mechanism behind this effect.Five studies have verified the main effect,intermediary mechanism,and boundary conditions.At the theoretical level,this paper introduces the visual design of the resource-saving prompt signs into the research field of consumer resource conservation for the first time,thus providing a new predictive factor for why consumers will show non-saving intention and non-saving behavior.At the same time,this paper contributes a new outcome variable(consumers’ intention to not save resources)and a new explanatory mechanism(perceived persuasion strength)to the study of the texts interstitial in visual design.At the practical level,this paper discusses when and why consumers will show the intention and behavior of not saving resources,which can provide theoretical guidance for the visual design of resource-saving signs of profit-making organizations such as government,non-profit public welfare organizations,hotels,and catering organizations. |
