The Media Influence on Consumers' Energy-Saving Technology Adoption in Korea: An Empirical Study

The current study attempts to expand our understanding of the determinants of energy-saving technology (EST) use by focusing on the individual aspects of environmental behaviors. This study integrates the hedonic, normative, and gain goals to explain the causal relationship between users and EST use. By adopting Goal-Framing Theory, this study proposed three individual goal frames in the environmental context: hedonic (perceived pleasurability), normative (social norms), and gain goals (legislative pressure and economic factor). Partial Least Square (PLS) was used to analyze the data from 104 respondents. Eight of the ten hypotheses were strongly supported. We found that social norms, perceived pleasurability, economic factor, and legislative pressure had positive and significant effects on attitude to EST use. Interestingly, we found that media influence did not have a severe effect on perceived pleasurability, and that the economic factor enforces mainly positive attitude to EST. Important theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.