Behavioral paradigms for studying pro-environmental behavior: A systematic review

"Eco-conscious appetites: Investigating organic food purchase intentions through consumption values, empowered by environmental self-identity and analyzed using MGA - Baltic insights"

Growing consumer interest in organic food has attracted the attention of the academic community. While the existing literature broadly examines the acceptability of organic food, there is a recognized need to delve deeper into consumer values. This study fills this gap by applying the theory of consumer values. The data was collected as part of a survey of 1000 Lithuanian consumers to evaluate the proposed hypotheses empirically. The results show that functional value (quality), social value, conditional value, emotional value, and epistemic value positively influence purchase intention for organic food. Conversely, functional value (price) does not significantly impact the purchase intention of organic food. Furthermore, the study recognizes a significant moderating impact of environmental self-identity in shaping the relationship between conditional value, emotional value, and purchase intention of organic food. In addition, a multi-group analysis examines notable differences between consumer groups based on gender, education, age, and income. The results indicate significant group differences, showing that purchasing behavior among women, younger consumers, those with higher incomes, and those with higher education levels are more susceptible to these values. This research improves our understanding of consumer values regarding organic food in Lithuania and provides valuable guidance to managers and policymakers. By recognizing the intricate interplay between different values and the influence of environmental self-identity, stakeholders can better tailor their marketing efforts and policies to meet the unique preferences of different consumer groups, ultimately promoting the growth of the organic food market.

Cathodal HD-tDCS above the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex increases environmentally sustainable decision-making

Environmental sustainability is characterized by a conflict between short-term self-interest and longer-term collective interests. Self-control capacity has been proposed to be a crucial determinant of people's ability to overcome this conflict. Yet, causal evidence is lacking, and previous research is dominated by the use of self-report measures. Here, we modulated self-control capacity by applying inhibitory high-definition transcranial current stimulation (HD-tDCS) above the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) while participants engaged in an environmentally consequential decision-making task. The task includes conflicting and low conflicting trade-offs between short-term personal interests and long-term environmental benefits. Contrary to our preregistered expectation, inhibitory HD-tDCS above the left dlPFC, presumably by reducing self-control capacity, led to more, and not less, pro-environmental behavior in conflicting decisions. We speculate that in our exceptionally environmentally friendly sample, deviating from an environmentally sustainable default required self-control capacity, and that inhibiting the left dlPFC might have reduced participants' ability to do so.

The differential impact of climate interventions along the political divide in 60 countries

A major barrier to climate change mitigation is the political polarization of climate change beliefs. In a global experiment conducted in 60 countries (N = 51,224), we assess the differential impact of eleven climate interventions across the ideological divide. At baseline, we find political polarization of climate change beliefs and policy support globally, with people who reported being liberal believing and supporting climate policy more than those who reported being conservative (Cohen's d = 0.35 and 0.27, respectively). However, we find no evidence for a statistically significant difference between these groups in their engagement in a behavioral tree planting task. This conceptual-behavioral polarization incongruence results from self-identified conservatives acting despite not believing, rather than self-identified liberals not acting on their beliefs. We also find three interventions (emphasizing effective collective actions, writing a letter to a future generation member, and writing a letter from the future self) boost climate beliefs and policy support across the ideological spectrum, and one intervention (emphasizing scientific consensus) stimulates the climate action of people identifying as liberal. None of the interventions tested show evidence for a statistically significant boost in climate action for self-identified conservatives. We discuss implications for practitioners deploying targeted climate interventions.

Employees' behavioural action towards corporate environmental performance: The moderating effect of moral reflectiveness

The evolution of the hotel industry's corporate environmental performance cannot be realized without employees acting in an environmentally friendly manner, such as low carbon behaviour. However, a thorough analysis of the factors influencing employees' low-carbon behaviour and hotels' corporate environmental performance has not yet been done. To overcome this literature gap and envision the social identity theory, this study evaluated how employees' green self-efficacy, environmental awareness, and perceived corporate environmental responsibility facilitate staff low carbon behaviour. Also, the study explored the moderation role of employees' moral reflectiveness. Through a purposive sampling technique, data was collected from 455 employees in the hotel industry in South Africa. The partial least squares structural equation model method examined the proposed hypothesis. The empirical findings revealed that: (1) employees' green self-efficacy, environmental awareness, and perceived corporate environmental responsibility positively influence their low carbon behaviour. (2) Employees' low carbon behaviour directly and positively affected hotels' corporate environmental performance. (3) The outcome supported the moderation effect of employees' moral reflectiveness on the linkage between green self-efficacy and low-carbon behaviour. The practical and theoretical implications are discussed. The limitations and areas of future research are further outlined.

When eco-anger (but not eco-anxiety nor eco-sadness) makes you change! A temporal network approach to the emotional experience of climate change

Research on the emotional experience of climate change has become a hot topic. Yet uncertainties remain regarding the interplay between climate change-related emotions (i.e., eco-anxiety, eco-anger, eco-sadness), general emotions (i.e., regardless of climate change), and pro-environmental behaviors. Most previous research has focused on cross-sectional studies, and eco-emotions in everyday life have seldom been considered. In this preregistered study, 102 participants from the general population rated their eco-emotions (i.e., eco-anxiety, eco-anger, eco-sadness), general emotions (i.e., anxiety, anger, sadness), and pro-environmental intentions and behaviors daily over a 60-day period. Using a multilevel vector autoregressive approach, we computed three network models representing temporal (i.e., from one time-point to the next), contemporaneous (i.e., during the same time-frame), and between-subject (i.e., similar to cross-sectional approach) associations between variables. Results show that eco-anger was the only predictor of pro-environmental intentions and behaviors over time. At the contemporaneous level, the momentary experience of each eco-emotion was associated with the momentary emotional experience of the corresponding general emotion, indicating the distinctiveness of each eco-emotion and the correspondence between its experience and that of its general, non-climate-related emotion. Overall, our findings 1) emphasize the driving role of eco-anger in prompting pro-environmental behaviors over time, 2) suggest a functional and experiential distinction between eco-emotions, and 3) provide data-driven clues for the field's larger quest to establish the scientific foundations of eco-emotions.

Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions' effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior-several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people's initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

Cli-fi videos can increase charitable donations: experimental evidence from the United Kingdom

Recent research has begun to investigate if climate fiction, or cli-fi, can increase people's support for pro-climate initiatives. Emerging evidence focuses on whether cli-fi stories affect people's self-reported emotions, attitudes, and intentions. Few studies, however, examine the effect of such stories on revealed behavior, and whether the cli-fi story medium, i.e., whether stories are presented in text, audio, or audio-visual format, matters. We investigate the causal effect of cli-fi stories, and the medium through which they are communicated (textual, audio, or audio-visual) on self-reported support for climate policy, individual and collective action intentions, and a revealed measure of charitable donations. In a pre-registered online experiment (n = 1,085 UK adults), participants were randomly assigned to one of 5 conditions - to read scientific information about climate change (scientific information condition), read a story unrelated to the environment (control), read a cli-fi story in which a protagonist took intentional pro-environmental actions (fiction text), listen to the same cli-fi story in audio format (fiction audio), or watch an animation of the cli-fi story (fiction video). When comparing the fiction-text, fact-text, and control conditions, we found that cli-fi stories are not always more effective than alternative climate communications: participants in the fact-text condition reported higher support for climate policies, and intentions of taking individual environmental actions, and negative feelings of sadness, disappointment, and guilt, compared to the text-based control and cli-fi text condition. When comparing the cli-fi media format, we found that cli-fi videos were most effective in increasing pro-environmental charitable donations in an incentivized choice task, and self-reported feelings of happiness, hope, and inspiration. The findings show that scientific information about the climate and climate-fiction have an important place in the climate communications toolkit and can offer distinct pathways to enhance support for policy and behavioral change. Communicators seeking to inspire individual pro-environmental actions can consider telling cli-fi stories in video, which may be more compelling. And communicators seeking to enhance public support for societal changes, via climate policies, may benefit from disseminating scientific information about climate change.

Pro-Environmental Behavior and Climate Change Anxiety, Perception, Hope, and Despair According to Political Orientation

The main objective of this paper is to assess pro-environmental behavior, climate change anxiety, perception, hope, and despair in different political orientations. Our specific aims included to assess the validity of all the instruments used; to assess whether the factor structure of the scales were valid across political orientations; to evaluate their reliability; to assess differences concerning age, gender, and political orientation; to learn the variables that explain pro-environmental behavior; and to evaluate the moderating role of climate change perception, despair, and hope in the relationship between climate change anxiety and pro-environmental behavior. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs), multi-group CFAs (to calculate measurement invariance), multiple linear regressions, and moderations were performed. Results showed that pro-environmental behavior and climate change hope achieved the four assessed levels of invariance across different political orientations; climate change anxiety achieved the first three levels of invariance; and climate change perception and climate change despair achieved configural invariance. Climate change anxiety, personal experience with climate change, and climate change perception (total, reality, and consequences) presented higher values for the left political orientation than for the right or the center. Climate change anxiety variables contributed most to explaining pro-environmental behaviors. Hope, despair, and climate change perception (consequences) moderated the relationship between climate change anxiety and pro-environmental behavior. These results open up new avenues for investigation, specifically to understand why high levels of anxiety lead to more pro-environmental behaviors.

Does pro-environmental attitude predicts pro-environmental behavior? Comparing sustainability connection in emotional and cognitive environments among football fans and university students

Environmental sustainability is an imperative topic in contemporary business-related research, aiming to understand and predict how individuals' environmentally friendly behaviors can be encouraged. This research aims to empirically examine the relationship between individuals' pro-environmental attitude and pro-environmental behavior; and to compare two groups of individuals that encompass emotional and cognitive links to environmental sustainability: emotionally involved sport fans and socially conscious university students. Two studies, involving more than 1400 respondents, were conducted. Study 1 uses structural equation modelling (SEM) to test the relationship between consumers' environmental attitudes and environmental behaviors. Study 2 uses SEM multigroup analysis to compare the attitudes and behaviors of sport fans and university students. The results showed that participants' pro-environmental attitude had a positive and significant effect on pro-environmental behavior. The type of consumer plays an important role in strengthening the relationship between pro-environmental attitude and pro-environmental behavior. Despite the higher average levels of pro-environmental attitude and pro-environment behavior evidenced by the sport fans, the influence of attitude on behavior is higher on socially conscious students, the group with a more cognitive and intrinsic link with the natural environment and sustainability initiatives. Despite the positive link attitudes-behaviors, empirical insights suggest that the connection between sport fans and the club is vital to reinforce the commitment with a stronger match between attitudes and behaviors. The findings also have implications for practitioners and policymakers in optimizing their strategies to encourage effective pro-environmental actions.

Impact of the citizen science project COLLECT on ocean literacy and well-being within a north/west African and south-east Asian context

Plastic pollution is both a societal and environmental problem and citizen science has shown to be a useful tool to engage both the public and professionals in addressing it. However, knowledge on the educational and behavioral impacts of citizen science projects focusing on marine litter remains limited. Our preregistered study investigates the impact of the citizen science project Citizen Observation of Local Litter in coastal ECosysTems (COLLECT) on the participants' ocean literacy, pro-environmental intentions and attitudes, well-being, and nature connectedness, using a pretest-posttest design. A total of 410 secondary school students from seven countries, in Africa (Benin, Cabo Verde, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria) and Asia (Malaysia) were trained to sample plastics on sandy beaches and to analyze their collection in the classroom. Non-parametric statistical tests (n = 239 matched participants) demonstrate that the COLLECT project positively impacted ocean literacy (i.e., awareness and knowledge of marine litter, self-reported litter-reducing behaviors, attitudes towards beach litter removal). The COLLECT project also led to higher pro-environmental behavioral intentions for students in Benin and Ghana (implying a positive spillover effect) and higher well-being and nature connectedness for students in Benin. Results are interpreted in consideration of a high baseline in awareness and attitudes towards marine litter, a low internal consistency of pro-environmental attitudes, the cultural context of the participating countries, and the unique settings of the project's implementation. Our study highlights the benefits and challenges of understanding how citizen science impacts the perceptions and behaviors towards marine litter in youth from the respective regions.

A network approach to climate change anxiety and its key related features

Research has pointed to startling worldwide rates of people reporting considerable anxiety vis-à-vis climate change. Yet, uncertainties remain regarding how climate anxiety's cognitive-emotional features and daily life functional impairments interact with one another and with climate change experience, pro-environmental behaviors, and general worry. In this study, we apply network analyses to examine the associations among these variables in an international community sample (n = 874). We computed two network models, a graphical Gaussian model to explore network structure, potential communities, and influential nodes, and a directed acyclic graph to examine the probabilistic dependencies among the variables. Both network models pointed to the cognitive-emotional features of climate anxiety as a potential hub bridging general worry, the experience of climate change, pro-environmental behaviors, and the functional impairments associated with climate anxiety. Our findings offer data-driven clues for the field's larger quest to establish the foundations of climate anxiety.