This article examines the green attitude–behaviour gap as a decision problem in which value priorities, contextual cues, heuristic appraisal under bounded rationality and reflective evaluation interact in green purchasing. It develops the Value–Heuristic Sensitivity Model to explain how some considerations become more salient than others before reflective evaluation is articulated.
The study analyses qualitative data from an open-ended survey question administered to Chinese millennials in Macao (n = 335), yielding 570 first-order coded cues. Using a staged interpretive procedure, the analysis develops second-order themes and third-order aggregated dimensions. Counts and percentages are reported as indicators of relative salience rather than behavioural frequency, population prevalence or causal importance.
The analysis identified 11 second-order themes grouped into four third-order aggregated dimensions. Product-, price- and access-related considerations were most frequent, suggesting that utility-oriented cues were especially salient in participants' accounts. Environmental and moral concerns remained present, but were less dominant, whilst institutional and habitual considerations appeared less often.
Rather than adding another antecedent to the theory of planned behaviour, the article reorganises the explanatory architecture of green purchasing decisions. It proposes an interpretive account of how value priorities may shape cue salience before heuristic appraisal and later reflective evaluation, offering a more process-sensitive explanation of how the green attitude–behaviour gap may arise under bounded decision conditions.
