Nurturing Nature: The Role of Compassion for Nature in Promoting Sustainable Consumption

The current study aims to improve our understanding of compassion, specifically compassion for nature, while examining its effect on sustainable consumption. Even though compassion is a distinct emotion in the psychology literature, compassion for nature is relatively understudied. Our first aim is to develop a scale to measure trait-level compassion for nature since existing scales fail to capture all elements of compassion. Moreover, we try to manipulate state-level compassion for nature to prove our hypothesis that compassion for nature leads to more sustainable consumption practices. Our findings are expected to have theoretical, empirical, and practical implications. Our research aligns with the missions of Transformative Consumer Research as it attempts to have a positive societal impact and provide useful findings to secure larger grants.