The Impact of Green Advertisements on Cognitive Dissonance among Youth Regarding Environmental Issues: Experimental Study

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor of Public Relations and Advertising, Faculty of Information, Menoufia University

2 master’s researcher in the Department of Media, Faculty of Arts, Minya University

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze the impact of green advertising on the attitudes and behaviour of Egyptian youth with regard to environmental issues, including climate change. Green advertising is a commonly used strategy in recent years to market products allegedly having a positive impact on the environment.
Research is based on both experimental and comparative methodologies, employing the "Cognitive Dissonance Theory" and testing its hypotheses that individuals feel disharmony when they have conflicting beliefs or attitudes. The experiment has been applied to two pilot groups of students at Minia and Menoufia Universities, each group consist from 50 participant students.
The authors have found that exposure to green advertisements increases the awareness and knowledge of environmental issues among university students. This increased awareness has led to partial shifts in their attitudes towards the environment and their expected behaviour, and thus the sighting of green advertising has contributed relatively to remove the cognitive dissonance observed between participants. The results of the comparative study also showed that differences between research groups were limited, which reflects the general understanding of the issue among Egyptian university youth. Thus, it can be judged that Egyptian university students have the motivation to reduce dissonance on environmental issues, reflecting a reasonable understanding of the importance of each individual role in contributing to environmental protection through more environmentally supportive attitudes and behaviours in the light of the difficult conditions the world is facing nowadays like: climate changes and various environmental crises.
 

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