Achieving a sustainable future will require changes in behavior, and recent analyses have shown the importance of a behavioral perspective in addressing environmental issues. This chapter reviews the large and rapidly growing body of psychological research aimed at understanding and promoting pro-environmental behavior. The behavior change research is organized into approaches that focus on the person and those that focus on the context. Person-level approaches include information campaigns, along with approaches that target egoistic, social-altruistic, and biospheric motivational bases of behavior. Context-level approaches have generally focused on convenience and structural barriers, but new research is examining the role of contextual variables in activating or enhancing personal motivations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of practical considerations, including behavior selection, rebound effects, and spillover.

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Vertical disintegration in manufacturing industries has been an increasing trend since the 1990s in many countries. According to a prevailing management paradigm of focusing on core competencies, firms should have vertically disintegrated (i.e. outsourced non-core competencies) to achieve cost savings, enhance competitiveness and improve firm performance. In line with this management paradigm, most empirical studies therefore hypothesized a negative linear relationship between the degree of vertical integration and firm performance, expecting performance to rise when vertical integration decreases.In contrast to previous studies, finding mixed results, we assume an inverted u-shaped relationship, theoretically based on transaction cost economics and the resource-based view of the firm, and by considering advantages and disadvantages of vertical integration, with an optimal level of vertical integration, where firms with a too low degree of vertical integration could achieve higher performance by vertical integration, while firms with too broad vertical integration could achieve higher performance by vertical disintegration.With respect to our data based on a sample of 434 German manufacturing firms between 1993 and 2013 we find a decreasing trend of vertical integration over time. Applying multiple regression analysis, our findings suggest a positive, but diminishing relationship between the degree of vertical integration and financial performance. These two findings describe a paradox of vertical disintegration. The decreasing trend mainly emerges because lower performing firms outsourced their

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When researchers fail to control for confounding factors, the causes of behavior can be more apparent than real, even in experimental research. The current study replicates an experiment by Weinstein, Przybylski, and Ryan (2009) with the goal of demonstrating that their main fi nding could have resulted from diff erences in people's prosocial propensity. In their research, they found their hypothesized interaction eff ect: depending on the extent of immersion, participants presented with images of nature were found to be more prosocial in both their actions and in their declarations. Our sample of 175 adults (M age = 29.7 yr., SD = 11.7; 97 men, 78 women) was approached personally, randomly assigned to viewing either urban or nature images, and instructed to immerse themselves in the respective images. Using two formally distinct measures of participants' prosocial propensity (i.e., before and after the intervention), the hypothesis that individual diff erences in people's prosocial propensity can bias conclusions about the origins of prosocial behavior in experimental research was supported. To avoid invalid conclusions, the prosocial propensity levels of research participants should be controlled for.

Perceptual deterrence research has consistently found that criminal offending is inversely related to subsequent perceptions of the risk of being caught or arrested. This inverse relationship has been dubbed an “experiential effect,” reflecting the idea that people learn by committing (undetected) crimes that the detection or arrest risk is lower than first feared. The current study explores the validity of this experiential argument. It relies on self-report data from 3,259 adolescent participants in the panel study Crime in the modern City (Duisburg, Germany). We computed detection rates and risk perceptions, and used fixed effects models to investigate the proposed experiential learning process. Most findings support the experiential argument: (1) juvenile offenses were rarely detected by the police, (2) juveniles (especially those inexperienced with crime) tended to overestimate the detection risk, (3) juveniles reduced their risk perceptions when they committed crimes, (4) this reduction occurred primarily among those who overestimated the detection risk in periods when they were not committing crimes. However, the study also produced the surprising finding that the experiential effect seems to be short-lived: people appeared to return to initial risk perception levels when they stopped committing crimes. Overall, the results corroborate the experiential argument. However, they also indicate that the argument may need revision to account for the potential short-term nature of the experiential effect. This “ephemerality effect” is good news for policy, as lowered risk perceptions will in most cases only temporarily increase the likelihood of future delinquency.

People differ in their personal commitment to fighting climate change and protecting the environment. The question is, can we validly measure people’s commitment by what they say and what they claim they do in opinion polls? In our research, we demonstrate that opinions and reports of past behavior can be aggregated into comparable depictions of people’s personal commitment to fighting climate change and protecting the environment (i.e., their environmental attitudes). In contrast to the commonly used operational scaling approaches, we ground our measure of people’s environmental attitudes in a mathematically formalized psychological theory of the response process—the Campbell paradigm. This theory of the response process has already been extensively validated, and its relevance for manifest behavior has repeatedly been shown as well. In our secondary analysis of Eurobarometer data (N = 27,998) from 28 European countries, we apply the Campbell paradigm to a set of indicators that was not originally collected to be aggregated into a single scale. With our research, we propose a distinct way to measure behavior-relevant environmental attitudes that can be used even with a set of indicators that was originally atheoretically compiled. Overall, our study suggests that the Campbell paradigm provides a sound psychological measurement theory that can be applied to cross-cultural comparisons in the environmental protection domain.

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