Personal Norm and Pro-environmental Consumer Behavior: an Application of Norm Activation Theory

Manuscript type: Research paperResearch Aims: This study aims to fill the research gap from previous research regarding personal norms in explaining pro-environmental behavior, which does not involve awareness of consequences and ascription of responsibility as antecedents to activate personal norms. Therefore, this study tries to examine personal norms based on norm activation theory in explaining behavior.Design/methodology/approach: The final sample size is 300 respondents selected through purposive sampling technique. Primary data is collected through a closed-end questionnaire. Data analysis consists of two stages, namely the confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation model.Research Findings: Awareness of consequences and ascription of responsibility significantly form a personal norm as a core factor of the norm activation theory. Consumers feel that they have a moral obligation concerning the environment. Active personal norm, successfully forming both intention and actual behavior in the context of sorting out waste. In the downstream stage of consumer behavior, it will lead to becoming pro-environmental consumer behavior based on altruistic values.Theoretical Contribution/Originality: Personal norm is proven to be activated by awareness of consequences and ascription of responsibility. Active personal norm will lead to affect behavior, with or without being preceded by intention.Practitioner/Policy Implication: Social marketers can encourage consumers to behave proenvironmentally by activating the personal norm from their target audience first.Research limitation/Implications: This study was conducted in a cross-sectional period. Therefore, future studies will be more robust if the actual behavior is measured in a longitudinal period.


INTRODUCTION
The daily behavior of consumers is a good starting point in contributing to environmental sustainability. This is related to consumers' routine behavior in choosing, using (consuming), and disposing of products, which have a significant proportion of impact on environmental sustainability (Benedetti & Laureti, 2017;Moser, 2015).
There are at least seven clusters related to pro-environmental consumer behavior, namely: waste reduction, eco-shopping and eating, regular water and domestic energy conservation, one-off domestic energy conservation actions, eco-driving, political actions, dan reducing car use and flights (Whitmarsh & O'Neill, 2010).
In this context, social marketing has emerged as a popular and straightforward approach to promoting pro-environmental behavior (Jesson, 2009;Takahashi, 2009 2008). Sorting out waste is one of the behaviors that become a primary concern in social marketing. The results of a literature study conducted by Kim et al. (2019) revealed that waste sorting is the most commonly targeted behavior in research that focuses on pro-environmental behavior.
Therefore, on the downstream side of consumer behavior, waste sorting behavior is a specific behavior from consumers concerned about the environment.
There are various theoretical perspectives on which the researchers base their study of proenvironmental consumer behavior from multiple contexts. One of them is a theoretical perspective that focuses on the role of consumers' moral obligation to act that will benefit others. In this perspective, the personal norm will be active when a consumer is aware of the consequences of the behavior and the feeling of being responsible for the action. This perspective is based on the concept of Norm activation theory by Schwartz (1977).

Awareness of Consequences
In the early stages of activation, a person's personal norm will be triggered by an awareness of the consequences of not behaving pro-environmentally. This will then produce a person's feelings of moral obligation formed by personal norms (Schwartz, 1977

Ascription of Responsibility
Besides being activated by awareness of the consequences, the personal norm is also activated by an ascription of responsibility.
When these two conditions meet, a person's personal norm will become active, thus forming a feeling of personal obligation that guides behavior (Schwartz, 1977). Initially, the ascription of responsibility is defined as a feeling of responsibility from the negative consequences of not behaving in a pro-social manner (Bamberg et al., 2007;De Groot & Steg, 2009). Therefore, when someone realizes the negative consequences of not behaving pro-environmentally, that person will prefer to attribute these adverse consequences to himself as a consumer and assume responsibility for not having concern for the environment.
Referring to research from Bamberg et al. H2: Ascription of responsibility has a positive and significant effect on the personal norm.

Personal Norm
Personal norm is a core component in the NAT model, defined as a feeling of a moral obligation to perform or refrain from a specific action (Schwartz, 1977).

Sampling Frame
The target population that is the unit of analysis for this research is individuals in three major cities in Indonesia, namely shown that the value exceeds the threshold.
Therefore, there is an internal consistency of each measurement item on the latent variable.  Table 3.  Table 4.  Table 5. Personal norms of the consumers that been activated previously succeed to form both intention and behavior.  Table 6. Ascription of responsibility has a Simultaneously, the feeling of moral obligation and the intention of sorting out waste is realized to become actual behavior.
There are a large number of antecedents of the pro-environmental consumer behavior that have been researched previously. It was revealed that the antecedents are commonly relly on environmental values, knowledge, concerns, and attitudes (Ertz, Karakas, & Sarigöllü, 2016). This study relies on the theoretical basis of norm activation theory (Schwartz, 1977)