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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1550091
New Year as a Moment of Change in Pro-Environmental Product Consumption: evaluating the habit discontinuity and self-activation hypotheses using a large UK retail dataset
Provisionally accepted
Paul Haggar 1,2*
Yasmin Sachdev 3
Lorraine Whitmarsh 3* James Goulding 4 Andrew Smith 4 Gavin Smith 4- 1 University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom
- 2 School of Geography and Planning, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom
- 3 Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bath, Bath, England, United Kingdom
- 4 Business School, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, England, United Kingdom
Introduction: The New Year, and the New Year’s Resolution tradition, may establish January as a moment of personal change: when there could be a temporal landmark for making a “fresh start”, a habit discontinuity, and value activation. As such, January may afford opportunities for personal pro-environmental lifestyle changes, such as by changing product choices.Method: To investigate this empirically, we analysed existing data from a 2016 survey of retail customers (N = 12,968) linked to 35 months of their sales data (2012-2015) provided by a leading healthcare retailer in the United Kingdom. We compared sales in January to those in other months, focusing on sales of green product varieties and overall product sales (as a dematerialisation indicator), and sales of two self-enhancing health product types (nicotine replacement therapy products and weight reduction products) for comparison. Results: Our results confirmed that sales of self-enhancing health products were greater in January than in other months, but we found limited evidence for pro-environmental consumption in January, and no evidence to support the habit discontinuity or value activation hypotheses. Discussion: We discuss these results with respect to behaviour change intervention potential and moments of change theory.
Keywords: Pro-environmental consumption, temporal landmarks, habit discontinuity, Value activation, Fresh-Start Effect
Received: 22 Dec 2024; Accepted: 03 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Haggar, Sachdev, Whitmarsh, Goulding, Smith and Smith. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Paul Haggar, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom
Lorraine Whitmarsh, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, England, United Kingdom
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.