The impact of mandatory policies on residents' willingness to separate household waste: A moderated mediation model

The impact of mandatory policies on residents' willingness to separate waste and how they respond to such measures is not clearly understood. To answer this question, based on deterrence theory, theories of belief change, the theory of rational behavior, and the theory of cognitive consistency, this paper established a mechanism model for the impact of mandatory policies on residents' willingness to separate waste, and analyzed the roles of attitude, subjective norms, and new ecological paradigms. Through a questionnaire survey of 442 ordinary residents in Shanghai, hierarchical regression and bootstrapping analysis were used to verify the above model. The results showed that:(1) mandatory policies positively affected residents' attitude and subjective norms toward waste separation; (2) through the mediation of attitude and subjective norms, mandatory policies positively affected residents' willingness to separate waste; and (3) the new ecological paradigm moderated the above effects. For residents with higher ecological paradigm, the positive influence of mandatory policies on attitudes and subjective norms was stronger, and the mediation effect of attitude and subjective norms was also stronger.