Moving towards sustainable restaurants: bridging the attitude-behaviour gap

This paper proposed a path model to test the causal links from environmental values to environment-related attitudes, and how these variables lead to the intention to dine at sustainable restaurants among the patrons in Malaysia. SPSS and AMOS-SEM were used to test the data collected from 500 respondents. The results showed that the environmental values did not affect intention to dine at sustainable restaurants directly, but indirectly affected the intention via both attitude variables, and presented a three-path mediated effect on the path model. Besides, the specific attitudes towards sustainable practices of restaurants acted as the only predictor of intention, and not the general environmental attitudes. It concluded that using a specific environment-related attitude variable can better explain a specific behavioural intention to close the attitude-behaviour gap debated in the past studies. Both general and specific attitude variables should be included to mediate the relationship between environmental values and intention in the context of sustainable restaurants.