Many environmental behaviours involve a conflict between hedonic and gain goals versus normative goals; people often need to incur some costs to benefit the environment. Based on this assumption, we propose an integrated theoretical framework for understanding behaviour change that identifies two routes to encourage pro-environmental behaviour. First, the conflict between goals can be reduced by decreasing the (hedonic and gain) costs of pro-environmental choices. Although this route is important when proenvironmental choices are very costly, it may not result in sustained pro-environmental actions. Second, normative goals can be strengthened. This strategy may encourage pro-environmental actions, even when it is somewhat costly. We propose that the strength of normative goals depends on values and situational factors that influence the accessibility of these values. We discuss theoretical implications of our reasoning, and indicate how the integrated framework adopted in this paper may advance theory development and environmental policy making.

Imagine that the neighborhood you are living in is covered with graffiti, litter, and unreturned shopping carts. Would this reality cause you to litter more, trespass, or even steal? A thesis known as the broken windows theory suggests that signs of disorderly and petty criminal behavior trigger more disorderly and petty criminal behavior, thus causing the behavior to spread. This may cause neighborhoods to decay and the quality of life of its inhabitants to deteriorate. For a city government, this may be a vital policy issue. But does disorder really spread in neighborhoods? So far there has not been strong empirical support, and it is not clear what constitutes disorder and what may make it spread. We generated hypotheses about the spread of disorder and tested them in six field experiments. We found that, when people observe that others violated a certain social norm or legitimate rule, they are more likely to violate other norms or rules, which causes disorder to spread.

The relationship between biospheric values, environmental self-identity and environmental preferences, intentions and behaviour.

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Critical to the environmental success of sustainable innovations is the adoption by consumers. The consensus is that instrumental shortcomings of sustainable innovations inhibit their adoption. However, we argue that the adoption of sustainable innovations does not exclusively depend on their instrumental attributes. In addition, people may be motivated to adopt sustainable innovations because of their positive environmental and symbolic attributes, that is, they benefit the environment and can be used to signal positive characteristics to oneself and others. We studied the significance of instrumental, environmental and symbolic attributes for the adoption of two sustainable innovations: electric cars (Study 1) and local renewable energy systems (Study 2), following two methods. Results showed that when asked directly, participants claimed that instrumental and environmental attributes are most important for their decision to adopt sustainable innovations, while symbolic attributes were rated as less important. Interestingly, evaluations of the symbolic and environmental attributes of sustainable innovations, but not evaluations of their instrumental attributes, predicted different indicators of adoption (i.e., interest in, the acceptability of, and intention to adopt these sustainable innovations), suggesting that the significance of symbolic motives for adopting sustainable innovations may not be recognized by consumers. Moreover, favorable evaluations of symbolic attributes particularly enhanced interest in and acceptability of sustainable innovation when participants evaluated the instrumental attributes more negatively, but not when instrumental attributes were evaluated relatively positively. This suggests that the instrumental drawbacks of sustainable innovations may sometimes strengthen their positive signal, which can promote interest in sustainable innovations.