Abstract: Despite the success of plastic bag charges in the UK, there are still around a billion single-use plastic bags bought each year in England alone, and the government have made plans to increase the levy from 5 to 10 pence. Previous research has identified motivations for bringing personal bags to the supermarket, but little is known about the individuals who are continuing to frequently purchase single-use plastic bags after the levy. In this study, we harnessed over a million loyalty card transaction records from a high-street health and beauty retailer linked to 12,968 questionnaire responses measuring demographics, shopping motivations, and individual differences. We utilised an exploratory machine learning approach to expose the demographic and psychological predictors of frequent plastic bag consumption. In the transaction data we identified 2,326 frequent single-use plastic bag buyers, which we matched randomly to infrequent buyers to create the balanced sub-sample we used for modelling (N=4,652). Frequent bag buyers spent more money in store, were younger, more likely to be male, less frugal, open to new experiences, and displeased with their appearance compared with infrequent bag buyers. Statistical regional differences also occurred. Interestingly, environmental concerns did not predict plastic bag consumption, highlighting the disconnect between predicting pro-environmental attitudes and a specific ecological behaviour measured objectively in the real world.
Saturday, September 21, 2019
A million loyalty card transactions: Disconnect between predicting pro-environmental attitudes (against plastic bags) & a specific ecological behaviour measured objectively in the real world
Lavelle-Hill, Rosa E., Gavin Smith, Peter Bibby, David Clarke, and James Goulding. 2019. “Psychological and Demographic Predictors of Plastic Bag Consumption in Transaction Data.” PsyArXiv. September 20. doi:10.31234/osf.io/nv57c
Abstract: Despite the success of plastic bag charges in the UK, there are still around a billion single-use plastic bags bought each year in England alone, and the government have made plans to increase the levy from 5 to 10 pence. Previous research has identified motivations for bringing personal bags to the supermarket, but little is known about the individuals who are continuing to frequently purchase single-use plastic bags after the levy. In this study, we harnessed over a million loyalty card transaction records from a high-street health and beauty retailer linked to 12,968 questionnaire responses measuring demographics, shopping motivations, and individual differences. We utilised an exploratory machine learning approach to expose the demographic and psychological predictors of frequent plastic bag consumption. In the transaction data we identified 2,326 frequent single-use plastic bag buyers, which we matched randomly to infrequent buyers to create the balanced sub-sample we used for modelling (N=4,652). Frequent bag buyers spent more money in store, were younger, more likely to be male, less frugal, open to new experiences, and displeased with their appearance compared with infrequent bag buyers. Statistical regional differences also occurred. Interestingly, environmental concerns did not predict plastic bag consumption, highlighting the disconnect between predicting pro-environmental attitudes and a specific ecological behaviour measured objectively in the real world.
Abstract: Despite the success of plastic bag charges in the UK, there are still around a billion single-use plastic bags bought each year in England alone, and the government have made plans to increase the levy from 5 to 10 pence. Previous research has identified motivations for bringing personal bags to the supermarket, but little is known about the individuals who are continuing to frequently purchase single-use plastic bags after the levy. In this study, we harnessed over a million loyalty card transaction records from a high-street health and beauty retailer linked to 12,968 questionnaire responses measuring demographics, shopping motivations, and individual differences. We utilised an exploratory machine learning approach to expose the demographic and psychological predictors of frequent plastic bag consumption. In the transaction data we identified 2,326 frequent single-use plastic bag buyers, which we matched randomly to infrequent buyers to create the balanced sub-sample we used for modelling (N=4,652). Frequent bag buyers spent more money in store, were younger, more likely to be male, less frugal, open to new experiences, and displeased with their appearance compared with infrequent bag buyers. Statistical regional differences also occurred. Interestingly, environmental concerns did not predict plastic bag consumption, highlighting the disconnect between predicting pro-environmental attitudes and a specific ecological behaviour measured objectively in the real world.
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