Socio-Cultural Determinants and the Moderating Effect of Gender in Adopting Sustainable Consumption Behavior among University Students in Iran and Japan

Abstract

This article explores the underlying factors of sustainable consumption behavior. Survey data are employed to test the impacts of environmental attitude, knowledge, social awareness, perceived credibility of information sources, self-efficacy and gender on sustainable consumption patterns among samples of university students in Iran and Japan. This contributes to the scientific search for valid explanatory models that could be employed to foster lifestyle transformations towards sustainability. Our findings confirm positive relationship between self-efficacy, social awareness and sustainable consumption in both Japanese and Iranian samples. Other predicators did not have a consistent effect in both samples. This article also presents the results of moderated regression and discusses which impacts were moderated by gender. The discussion presents with interpretation of the findings and proposes possible alternative explanations.