Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

Understanding how consumers cognitively organize sustainability-related information is critical for promoting sustainable choices, yet sustainability is often treated as a unidimensional construct. This thesis adopts a psychological network approach to examine how sustainability-related evaluations are structured across products and companies. Using a two-phase design, Phase 1 (N = 20) employed free association tasks to identify salient sustainability-related products and companies. In Phase 2, a larger sample (N = 328) evaluated selected products and companies on general attitude, environmental value, functionality (for products), and green trust (for companies). Separate Gaussian Graphical Models were estimated for products and companies to examine associations among dimensions. Across both networks, sustainability-related evaluations exhibited non-uniform patterns of association. For companies, environmental value and green trust consistently formed tight connections, indicating that perceptions of environmental performance and credibility are closely linked. For products, environmental value was most strongly connected to perceived functionality, suggesting that practical usability plays a central role in how sustainable products are evaluated. In contrast, general attitude was less centrally embedded within sustainability-specific associations, reflecting its broader and more multifactorial nature. Network stability and accuracy analyses supported the robustness of these structural patterns. Together, these findings suggest that sustainability-related evaluations are organized as interconnected systems of evaluative components, offering a complementary perspective to approaches that summarize such evaluations in terms of broader underlying attitudes. By revealing how different evaluative components cluster and interact, the network approach provides a nuanced account of sustainability cognition with implications for theory, sustainability communication, and intervention design.