With climate change and its consequences believed to be among the most vital challenges for humanity and the Earth’s ecosystem, it is important to understand why individuals do or do not adopt proenvironmental attitudes and behaviors. Personality traits are well suited for this purpose. Because no recent work has systematically combined the accumulating evidence on this topic, we aimed to meta-analyze the associations of the Big Five and HEXACO personality domains with proenvironmental attitudes and behaviors. A meta-analysis of 38 sources ( N = 44,993) implicated openness and honesty-humility as the strongest correlates of proenvironmental attitudes ( r = .22 and .20) and behaviors ( r = .21 and .25). Agreeableness, conscientiousness, and, to a lesser extent, extraversion were also associated with proenvironmental attitudes ( r = .15, .12, and .09) and behaviors ( r = .10, .11, and .10). Heterogeneity among effect sizes was partly explained by samples’ gender ratio, age, and country of origin and by the personality model. P-curve analyses, funnel plots, and Egger’s tests indicated significant but sporadic and small publication bias. As a validity test, the meta-analytic associations collectively provided substantial predictive accuracy for proenvironmental attitudes ( r = .44–.45) and behaviors ( r = .28–.43) in independent holdout samples.

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Climate change mandates us to understand why individuals do (not) behave pro‐environmentally and personality traits are well suited for this purpose. Past research has mostly focused on how broad domain‐level personality traits were associated with pro‐environmental attitudes and behaviors. In two datasets (N = 501 and 287), we examined whether personality facets provided a more detailed picture of how personality traits were associated with pro‐environmental attitudes and behaviors. It was found that some facets were the main drivers of domain‐level associations. Furthermore, it was found that facets, collectively, predicted pro‐environmental attitudes (r = .50 to .52) and behaviors (r = .29 to .42) in holdout datasets. This predictive ability was on par with the predictive ability of domains. Therefore, facets provided a greater understanding of how personality traits were associated with pro‐environmental attitudes and behaviors. Furthermore, facets provided a similar predictive ability of pro‐environmental attitudes and behaviors to that of domains.

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Conservation psychology is an emerging field, with few studies examining the role of advertising imagery on environmental attitudes and behaviours. This study aimed to expand the knowledge in this field, by examining how different types of imagery affect pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. Undergraduate psychology students from Macquarie University (N = 124) were assigned to one of three brochure groups. These brochure groups consisted of a hard copy brochure which contained either positive, negative or no images which participants read at the start of the study. Participants' pro-environmental attitudes were then assessed using the New Ecological Paradigm, and behaviour through a hypothetical scenario in which respondents were asked to proportion $100 across three charity options or retain the money. It was found that positive imagery increased pro-environmental attitudes, over and above both the control (neutral) and negative images. In contrast, imagery did not affect pro-environmental behaviours. These findings suggest that positive images are most likely to elicit positive change in pro-environmental attitudes. However, these findings suggest that imagery in advertising does not impact pro-environmental behaviours.

Climate change mandates us to understand why individual’s (do not) act environmentally and personality traits are well suited for this purpose. Research has mostly focused on broad do-main-level associations between personality traits and pro-environmental behaviors and attitudes. In two datasets (N = 501 and 287), we examined whether facets provided a more detailed picture of these association. Some facets were found to be the main drivers of the do-main-level associations. Out-sample prediction analysis showed that facets collectively predicted pro-environmental attitudes (r = .50 to .52) and behaviors (r = .29 to .42), but domains matched them. Therefore, facets provided a greater understanding of traits’ association with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors than domains, but no additional overall predictive power.

Although the scientific evidence of anthropogenic climate change continues to grow, public discourse still reflects a high level of scepticism and political polarisation towards anthropogenic climate change. In this study (N = 499) we attempted to replicate and expand upon an earlier finding that environmental terminology (“climate change” versus “global warming”) could partly explain political polarisation in environmental scepticism (Schuldt, Konrath, & Schwarz, 2011). Participants completed a series of online questionnaires assessing personality traits, political preferences, belief in environmental phenomenon, and various pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. Those with a Conservative political orientation and/or party voting believed less in both climate change and global warming compared to those with a Liberal orientation and/or party voting. Furthermore, there was an interaction between continuously measured political orientation, but not party voting, and question wording on beliefs in environmental phenomena. Personality traits did not confound these effects. Furthermore, continuously measured political orientation was associated with pro-environmental attitudes, after controlling for personality traits, age, gender, area lived in, income, and education. The personality domains of Openness, and Conscientiousness, were consistently associated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, whereas Agreeableness was associated with pro-environmental attitudes but not with behaviours. This study highlights the importance of examining personality traits and political preferences together and suggests ways in which policy interventions can best be optimised to account for these individual differences.

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