Sustainability

Abstract

Over the years, sustainability has been a major theme discussed by the leading environmental organizations around the world. Excessive consumption is one of the factors that is directly connected to environmental issues, interfering with the sustainability capacity of the Earth. Attitudes and behavior are influenced by both conscious (explicit) or unconscious (implicit) associations that subjects have in their memory. In order to identify unconscious associations, specific implicit memory tests are required, such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is widely used to measure implicit associations towards several themes. This work aims to present the results from a pretest using the IAT to identify and measure the implicit associations of a group of environmental specialists regarding consumption and sustainability. By using the FreeIAT software, the IAT was customized for this research. The pretest with environmental specialists was conducted to check the consistency of the customized IAT. The Cronbach´s alpha was applied to measure the reliability of the test and showed good internal consistency. Since the results from the pretest with the specialists demonstrated that the customized IAT is reliable and consistent, this test can be applied to other groups of subjects to identify the implicit associations towards consumption and sustainability. The data obtained from the administration of the customized IAT will contribute to many research fields related to the environment, consumption, sustainability, energy and development.