An Integrated Framework for Encouraging Pro-environmental Behaviour: The role of values, situational factors and goals

Highlighting the important role of marketing in encouraging sustainable consumption, the current research presents a review of the academic literature from marketing and behavioral science that exa...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022242919825649

How to SHIFT Consumer Behaviors to be More Sustainable: A Literature Review and Guiding Framework:

Environmental psychology examines transactions between individuals and their built and natural environments. This includes investigating behaviors that inhibit or foster sustainable, climate-healthy, and nature-enhancing choices, the antecedents and correlates of those behaviors, and interventions to increase proenvironmental behavior. It also includes transactions in which nature provides restoration or inflicts stress, and transactions that are more mutual, such as the development of place attachment and identity and the impacts on and from important physical settings such as home, workplaces, schools, and public spaces. As people spend more time in virtual environments, online transactions are coming under increasing research attention. Every aspect of human existence occurs in one environment or another, and the transactions with and within them have important consequences both for people and their natural and built worlds. Environmental psychology matters.

Environmental Psychology Matters

Human behaviour is integral not only to causing global climate change but also to responding and adapting to it. Here, we argue that psychological research should inform efforts to address climate change, to avoid misunderstandings about human behaviour and motivations that can lead to ineffective or misguided policies. We review three key research areas: describing human perceptions of climate change; understanding and changing individual and household behaviour that drives climate change; and examining the human impacts of climate change and adaptation responses. Although much has been learned in these areas, we suggest important directions for further research.

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Psychological research and global climate change

Environmental campaigns often promote energy conservation by appealing to economic rather than environmental concerns, assuming self-interest drives people’s behaviour. New research discredits such conventional wisdom and shows that, at least in some cases, it is more effective to call on people’s interest in protecting the biosphere to encourage behavioural changes.

/pdf/comparing-the-effectiveness-of-monetary-versus-moral-motives-1h8v6qfzfo.pdf

Comparing the effectiveness of monetary versus moral motives in environmental campaigning

Inspired by the principles used to market physical products, campaigns to promote pro-environmental behaviour have increasingly emphasized self-interested (for example, economic) reasons for engaging with a self-transcendent cause (that is, protecting the environment)1, 2. Yet, psychological evidence about values and behaviour suggests that giving self-interested reasons, rather than self-transcending reasons, to carry out a self-transcending action should be ineffective at increasing self-transcending behaviour more generally3, 4. In other words, such a campaign may fail to cause spillover, or an increase in other, different environmental behaviours5. Here we show that recycling rates are dependent on the information participants receive about a separate environmental behaviour, car-sharing (carpooling in the USA). In two experiments, we found that recycling was significantly higher than control when participants received environmental information about car-sharing, but was no different from control when they received financial information or (in experiment 2) received both financial and environmental information. Our results suggest that, congruent with value theory, positive spillover from one environmental message to another behaviour (car-sharing to recycling) may occur primarily when self-transcending reasons alone are made salient.

Sameera Ahmed

Papers

Self-interest and pro-environmental behaviour