How can residents be motivated to participate in waste recycling? An analysis based on two survey experiments in China

Waste recycling constitutes an important part of sustainable municipal eco-management, but the chronic and enduring problem in China is how to motivate residents to participate. Although previous research has found that persuasive incentives can exert a powerful influence on people's pro-environmental behavior, little work placed much emphasis on the effect of various incentives and make a comparison. The moderating role of social norms in indigenous scene is also ignored. The present research attempts to tackle this issue to explore theoretically the black box of China's policy implementation. We conducted two survey experiments online in China from February 28 to April 25, 2021. The results in experiment 1 show that four incentives significantly affect respondents' disposition toward recycling behavior, of which monetary incentive is the most effective strategy and the order of the rest incentives is environmental framing incentive, institutional incentive and moral incentive according to the effect calculated by the model. Furthermore, experiment 2 finds that social norms positively moderate the nexus between incentives and recycling behavior, and descriptive norms play a more significant role than injunctive norms. Finally, implications for public policy and limitations are discussed.

Moral Frames Are Persuasive and Moralize Attitudes; Nonmoral Frames Are Persuasive and De-Moralize Attitudes

Moral framing and reframing strategies persuade people holding moralized attitudes (i.e., attitudes having a moral basis). However, these strategies may have unintended side effects: They have the potential to moralize people's attitudes further and as a consequence lower their willingness to compromise on issues. Across three experimental studies with adult U.S. participants (Study 1: N = 2,151, Study 2: N = 1,590, Study 3: N = 1,015), we used persuasion messages (moral, nonmoral, and control) that opposed new big-data technologies (crime-surveillance technologies and hiring algorithms). We consistently found that moral frames were persuasive and moralized people's attitudes, whereas nonmoral frames were persuasive and de-moralized people's attitudes. Moral frames also lowered people's willingness to compromise and reduced behavioral indicators of compromise. Exploratory analyses suggest that feelings of anger and disgust may drive moralization, whereas perceiving the technologies to be financially costly may drive de-moralization. The findings imply that use of moral frames can increase and entrench moral divides rather than bridge them.

I May Not Agree With You, but I Trust You: Caring About Social Issues Signals Integrity

What characteristics of an individual signal trustworthiness to other people? I propose that individuals who care about contentious social issues signal to observers that they have integrity and thus can be trusted. Critically, this signal conveys trustworthiness whether or not the target and the observer hold the same view on the issue. Five studies (N = 3,817) demonstrated the predicted effect of caring on integrity-based trust (Studies 1, 2, 3a, 3b, and 4)-even in cases of strong disagreement-across a variety of issues (Study 1) and when behavioral outcomes with real stakes were used (Studies 3a and 3b). This effect largely results from a perception of low-caring targets as particularly untrustworthy (Study 2). Additionally, participants trusted targets with staunchly opposing views about an issue even though they simultaneously disliked them (Study 4). These findings have important implications for how people form impressions of others and speak to potential interventions to help mitigate the growing ideological divide.

Climate Justice: High-Status Ingroup Social Models Increase Pro-Environmental Action Through Making Actions Seem More Moral

Recent work has suggested that our cognitive biases and moral psychology may pose significant barriers to tackling climate change. Here, we report evidence that through status and group-based social influence processes, and our moral sense of justice, it may be possible to employ such characteristics of the human mind in efforts to engender pro-environmental action. We draw on applied work demonstrating the efficacy of social modeling techniques in order to examine the indirect effects of social model status and group membership (through perceptions of efficacy, pro-environmental social identity and moral judgments of how fair it is for individuals to perform particular pro-environmental actions) on pro-environmental action tendencies. We find evidence that high- (vs. low-) status models increase pro-environmental action, in part, through making such actions seem morally fairer to undertake. This effect of high-status models only occurs when they share a meaningful ingroup membership with the target of influence. Further, we find evidence that this conditional effect of high-status models may also have a direct impact on action tendencies. While the exact behaviors that are influenced may vary across student and non-student samples, we argue that a focus on the "justice pathway" to action and the social-cognitive features of models may offer a good opportunity for cognitive and behavioral scientists to integrate insights from basic research with those stemming from more applied research efforts.