Sustainability Blind Spots for Managers: Status Quo Bias, Pluralistic Ignorance, and Misperception of Policy Effectiveness

We document a constellation of biases preventing managers from adopting the sustainability policies they themselves claim to want for their organizations. Across four studies, we find that managers consistently hold a bias toward status quo sustainability policies, display pluralistic ignorance regarding support for new organizational sustainability policies, and have low levels of knowledge of objective effectiveness. We demonstrate that informational interventions tied to the specific biases managers exhibit can be effective at increasing support for sustainability policies in organizations.