‘I had no idea that greenwashing was even a thing’: identifying the cognitive mechanisms of exemplars in greenwashing literacy interventions

As individuals become more aware and concerned about their own contribution to global climate change, empowering consumers to make informed decisions that are beneficial to the environment is of chief importance. This study tests how literacy interventions can be used to empower and increase people’s ability to identify greenwashing as a defense against for-profit organizations who seek to elevate the attractiveness of their products using deceptive appeals. Relying on work from the communications and education disciplines, this work seeks to inform best practices for designing simple greenwashing literacy interventions. Using a between-subjects experiment (N = 476), we found that vividness was rated the highest in a literacy intervention that embedded both textual quotes and image exemplars, which increased literacy outcomes. Similarly, the quote-only condition fully mediated the relationship between the intervention and literacy outcomes. Neither cognitive load nor the availability heuristic significantly mediated the intervention and literacy outcomes. This research offers important theoretical and practical implications for using exemplars as educational tools on social media.