Bio: Aruna is an Assistant Professor, in the Marketing Group at SOL. In her research she uses behavioural experiments and observational data to study consumer decisions in contexts spanning durable goods ownership and maintenance; online search and reviews; and human-AI interactions.

Abstract: Amid the growing volume of information on climate change and the environmental consequences of consumption, individuals are often overwhelmed and uncertain about whether their actions or purchases are truly sustainable. Such lack of clarity can undermine the effectiveness of large-scale sustainability policies (Andrade and Vieites 2025), which often rely on individual-level choices. Anchoring in recent research on heuristics and biases in sustainability evaluations (Andretti et. al. 2024; Winterich, Reczek and Makov 2024), the present research takes a point of departure by bringing forth the role of spatial orderliness in shaping judgments about an object’s sustainability. Specifically, we demonstrate that consumers hold an orderly=green association, which leads them to incorrectly judge an orderly space and the objects within that space as more sustainable, despite no objective impact of spatial orderliness on environmental sustainability of that space.