How Green Skepticism Undermines Green Purchase Intention: The Roles of Information Seeking and Anticipated Guilt

Against the backdrop of the transition toward a sustainable society, the green product market has expanded steadily. However, green skepticism poses a significant challenge to promoting sustainable consumption. This study develops a parallel mediation model to examine how green skepticism influences green purchase intention through information seeking and anticipated guilt among Chinese consumers. Survey data were collected from 511 Chinese respondents and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with IBM SPSS AMOS 30. While prior research typically assumes a direct negative effect of skepticism on green purchase intention, our results show that green skepticism does not exert a significant direct effect on green purchase intention. Instead, green skepticism indirectly undermines green purchase intention by reducing consumers’ motivation to seek green product information and weakening anticipated guilt. These findings challenge the prevailing “skepticism-as-verification” view and suggest that green skepticism may foster information avoidance and moral disengagement rather than deeper cognitive and moral engagement. By identifying these disengagement pathways, this study helps clarify previously mixed findings on the relationship between green skepticism and green purchase intention. It delineates important boundary conditions for the effectiveness of green marketing and policy interventions.