Today’s episode adds to our men and masculinities series of episodes and continues our series on gender and environmental justice.  Our guest is Professor James Wilkie, Assistant Professor at Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame University. Professor Wilkie is a consumer psychologist whose research incorporates aspects of implicit social cognition to examine how consumers interpret various aspects of the marketplace in biased fashions.

We speak with Professor Wilkie about his current work which draws on this perspective to examine how consumers’ judgment and decisions are influenced by: 1). gender cues, 2). numeric information (e.g., prices), and 3). materialistic framing. In particular, Professor Wilkie’s recent research has centered on how men’s eco-friendly behavior may be negatively correlated to the extent to which that behavior may brand them as “feminine.”  We also explore Professor Wilkie’s suggestions on how pro-environmental marketers might position their communications to incentivize men to engage in more eco-friendly behavior.

If you want to explore more of Professor Wilkie’s research, you can download his papers below, as well as explore other resources we discussed on the show: