You plant a virtual tree, we'll plant a real tree: Understanding users' adoption of the Ant Forest mobile gaming application from a behavioral reasoning theory perspective

Abstract

Growing green plants can enrich the natural environment and benefit society in many ways. With this in mind, a new Ant Forest mobile gaming application was launched in China by Alipay, which is embedded in the Alipay application. Since Ant Forest is entirely a new green behavior phenomenon—of a type rarely studied in the literature—we explore users’ attitudes toward Ant Forest and their continued use intentions toward it with the moderating role of environmental knowledge based on behavioral reasoning theory (BRT). A quantitative approach using structural equation modeling and SmartPLS 3 was employed. Analysis of data collected from 293 actual Ant Forest users divulges that the user values significantly influence “reasons for” (RF), “reasons against” (RA), and attitude toward Ant Forest. Similarly, both RF (environmental benefits, social influence, hedonic motivation, and convenience) and RA (privacy concerns, usage barrier, and green skepticism) affect attitude and intention to continue using Ant Forest. The results also show that environmental knowledge moderates the effects of attitude on continuance intention. Theoretically, this study contributes to the literature on Ant Forest and BRT in the context of green behavior. Practically, our findings bring essential insights for the enterprises and governments who want to promote green and low-carbon societies.

Introduction

Among the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, addressing environmental pollution (e.g., reducing carbon footprints) is considered particularly important (Gupta, 2020; Li et al., 2020). Many companies use CSR as a crucial tool to present themselves as more socially responsible actors to attract consumers, society, and government in general (Bahta et al., 2020; Waheed et al., 2020). On the other hand, consumers may feel particularly good when using a product or service provided by a socially responsible company.

Going green, which can be described as “the adoption of environmental management practices, intended as practices aimed at minimizing the detrimental impact on the environment in terms of both resource depletion and pollution” (Tzschentke et al., 2008, p. 126), has become a global phenomenon (Li and Liu, 2020). Environmental pollution can be generated from many sources, such as using plastic (Hameed et al., 2020) or vehicles (Gupta, 2020). According to Jambeck et al. (2015), an average individual produces 52 kg of plastic waste yearly, and vehicles are also perceived as the primary contributor to environmental problems through petrol or diesel exhaust (Gupta, 2020).

Like some other countries, China is facing air pollution-related problems (Zhang et al., 2020). China is one of the biggest energy consumers in the world (Gong et al., 2020). It is the most significant emerging economy with a growth rate of up to 9.5% (Gong et al., 2020), and this rapid growth is at the cost of ecological damage from the use of heavy machinery and resources (Du et al., 2019). Different policies to address environmental issues are being introduced by the Chinese government, intended to encourage both organizations and individuals to contribute to avoiding ecological pollution (Zhang et al., 2020).

In light of the above, a new Ant Forest mobile gaming application was launched in China by Ant Financial Service Group in cooperation with Alipay. Alipay is the world's most popular and the largest third-party payment platform in China (Wang and Yao, 2020; Zhang et al., 2020). Since its launch in August 2016, Ant Forest has already prevented 20,000 tons of carbon emissions by providing convenient green transportation services to over 30 million people (Ant Financial, 2020). Inspired by this phenomenon, over 200,000 people use public bicycles every day in China, tantamount to planting 20,000 trees. In addition, Ant Forest created a 354,000-ton decrease in carbon emissions nationwide via electronic payments and documents (Ant Financial, 2020). Overall, as of the end of 2019, Alipay Ant Forest had reduced carbon emissions by 7.9 million tons by attracting over 500 million users and planting 122 million trees in China (see Fig. 1 for more detail; Business Wire, 2020). These contributions resulted in Ant Forest receiving the United Nations' “Champion of the Earth Award” in 2019 (Wang and Yao, 2020).

To participate in public benefit activities such as walks, online payment, travel by public transport, and other activities (e.g., bike shares), Ant Forest users need to create a carbon account. The user counts low-carbon activities and converts them into virtual green energy to plant a virtual tree in the personal Ant Forest account. When a user has enough energy in his/her carbon account to grow a virtual tree, Alipay plants a real tree in China. This motivates Ant Forest users to continue green activities, a new kind of green behavior activity that offers users a new way to protect the environment and reduce pollution.

Although Ant Forest has already met with great success, the sustainable growth of the Ant Forest will mainly depend on continued usage decisions (Zhang et al., 2020). Thus, understanding Ant Forest users' attitudes toward and intentions to continue using Ant Forest is vital to draw out insights regarding users' adoption of this novel green behavior. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to investigate the key factors that may play significant roles in shaping users’ attitudes toward Ant Forest and their intention to continue using it.

In recent years, there have been numerous studies focusing on the green phenomenon, eco-friendly products, or low-carbon behavior activities, such as actual green purchase behavior (Ali et al., 2020; Zarei and Maleki, 2018), green creativity (Li et al., 2020), green luxury or eco-luxury (Athwal et al., 2019), green skincare products (Hsu et al., 2017), green purchase intention (Sreen et al., 2018), or intention to buy green products (Yadav and Pathak, 2016), and green advertising (Matthes and Wonneberger, 2014) from the perspective of the theory of planned behavior (TPB; Ajzen, 1991), behavioral reasoning theory (BRT; Claudy and Peterson, 2014), or self-determination theory. Although these studies help us understand the background of greening, we use the BRT to develop a research framework to contribute to the current unexplored green phenomenon. Also, we show how environmental knowledge as moderation to the current BRT augments its effectiveness in the environmental setting.

The remainder of the paper presents the theoretical background and hypotheses development. Then the methodology and results are reported. The last parts of the paper are devoted to the conclusion and implications. A description of the limitations of the study and directions for further research are provided.