Abstract
<jats:p>Sustainability research explains pro-environmental conduct largely through conscious attitudes, awareness and stated intentions, yet a substantial psychological literature indicates that agents have no transparent access to the determinants of their own behaviour. This paper asks whether an environmental norm can remain evolutionarily stable when the agents who carry it cannot say why they act. Constitutive self-opacity is formalised as a microfoundation of the mutation term in a replicator-mutator dynamic defined on a two-strategy conformity game with a private cost of green action. Opacity is decomposed into an intensity parameter and a directional narrative bias, and the resulting cubic vector field is studied through Lyapunov and bifurcation methods with supporting numerical continuation. Three results follow. Opacity destroys both absorbing states and compresses the set of long-run outcomes towards the narrative bias. The green attractor is strictly more fragile than the brown one, by a factor determined by the ratio of the conformity benefit to the private cost. Above a critical intensity bounded above by half the conformity benefit, bistability collapses through a saddle-node bifurcation whose surviving branch is green if and only if the narrative bias exceeds the coordination threshold. Awareness-centred policy therefore acts on a channel that self-opacity has already closed, whereas the composition of the circulating narrative stock remains operative.</jats:p>