Vladas Griskevicius

Who they are

Griskevicius works on evolutionary approaches to consumer behaviour, status and motivation.

The 2010 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, with Joshua Tybur and Bram Van den Bergh, starts from an observation rather than an intuition. Green products often cost more and perform worse while the benefit goes to everybody, which makes buying one look like altruism. Biologists treat altruism as a costly signal. So status motives should raise demand for green products specifically.

Three experiments, and that is what they found: activating status motives led people to choose the green option over a more luxurious non-green one at the same price.

Key papers

Griskevicius, V., Tybur, J. M., & Van den Bergh, B. (2010). "Going green to be seen: status, reputation, and conspicuous conservation." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(3), 392-404. First author. Three experiments.

Key ideas

Conspicuous conservation: the worse product is chosen because it says something. See Costly Signalling and Conspicuous Consumption.

The dependent variable is what people want to buy. Whether the purchase achieves the social return is a different question, and Joël Berger's field test found no green-signalling effect.

Both can be true at once, and this site holds them that way: a motive can be real while the signal it chases does not work.

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