Based on a face-to-face survey of 800 urban consumers across Bogotá, Barranquilla, Cali and Medellín, the research introduces Consumer Wisdom as a mediating framework connecting personal values with habitual pro-environmental behaviours, specifically energy and water saving, recycling and sustainable purchasing. Its central contribution is to show that understanding sustainable consumption requires looking beyond what consumers believe or intend to do and examining the learned behavioural traits through which values become, or fail to become, everyday practices.
The study focuses on the relationship between Universalism, representing self-transcendent values, and Power, representing self-enhancement values, alongside six dimensions of Consumer Wisdom: Responsibility, Purpose, Flexibility, Perspective, Reasoning and Sustainability. At an aggregate level, Consumer Wisdom significantly mediates the positive relationship between Universalism and pro-environmental behaviour, whereas its mediating role in the relationship between Power and such behaviour is considerably weaker. The more detailed analysis, however, reveals that these relationships are far from uniform. Different pro-environmental behaviours have distinct pathways and antecedents, reinforcing the authors' argument that sustainable consumption should not be treated as a single behavioural category or approached through one universal intervention.
The findings demonstrate this complexity in practice. Responsibility and Sustainability positively influence recycling and sustainable purchasing, while Reasoning is associated with sustainable purchasing. Flexibility produces more unexpected outcomes, positively influencing energy and water savings while negatively relating to recycling and sustainable purchasing in the study. The authors suggest that flexible consumers may, in some cases, favour alternatives such as borrowing, renting, purchasing used products, durability and repairability rather than conventional behaviours explicitly presented as "green".
This opens an important perspective on sustainable consumption, shifting attention from simply making linear consumption less damaging towards practices associated with circularity, longer product lifecycles and "less-but-better" consumption. The findings consequently support more targeted approaches to behavioural change that recognise differences in consumer motivations, habits and the particular behaviour being addressed.
Overall, the paper contributes to understanding the value-action gap by positioning sustainable consumption as the outcome of a more complex interaction between values, learned habits and different forms of consumer decision-making. Its Colombian setting is particularly significant because the authors explicitly situate the research within the challenges facing emerging economies, where continued economic development and poverty reduction must be pursued without a proportional increase in environmental footprints.
Although the paper does not examine sustainable business models directly, its findings are highly relevant to them: models based on sustainable purchasing, circular consumption, product longevity, reuse or resource efficiency ultimately depend, at least partly, on how consumers engage with these alternatives in practice. The study therefore provides a useful reminder that developing more sustainable systems of consumption and production requires not only better products or environmental intentions, but a deeper understanding of the human behaviours and habits that determine whether more sustainable choices become part of everyday life.
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