Environmentalism as a trait: Gauging people's prosocial personality in terms of environmental engagement

Abstract

According to Hardin (1968), environmental deterioration stems from self-interest undermining people's resource conservation in the collective interest. Not surprisingly, selfless prosocial motives, such as personal feelings of moral obligation, have often been recognized as a key force behind people's environmentalism. In our research, we anticipated that environmentalists-people with an inclination for pro-environmental engagement-would possess a propensity to generally act prosocially. In an extension of previous work, we expected that a well-established self-report measure of past conservation behavior would predict people's active participation in a psychological experiment. Based on subjects' degree of environmental engagement, originally established in 2003, we re-contacted a sample of 502 persons in 2005. Of these 502 (68.5% low, 31.5% high in environmentalism), 131 showed up for the announced experiment. Among those participants, we found that environmentalists' prosocial personalities were additionally reflected in their social value orientations. Ninety percent of the environmentalists turned out to be prosocials, whereas only 65% of the less environmentally engaged subjects were prosocials. Overall, our findings lend credit to a notion of environmentalism as an indicator of even subtle quantitative differences in a person's prosocial trait level. By and large, environmentalists acted more prosocially even in mundane activities unrelated to environmental conservation. Additional evidence comes from the commons dilemma experiment in which the participants partook. There, we generally found comparatively more cooperation with others for the collective good from people high in environmentalism. Our findings represent circumstantial evidence for a prosocial propensity dimension along which people differ, and which is also reflected in people's pro-environmental behavioral performance. If, however, environmentalism has to be regarded as indicative of a prosocial trait rather than a state-like motive, high hopes for moral norms and other prosocial motives in environmental conservation do not seem warranted.

Toward an Integrated Approach to Environmental and Prosocial Education

“…Thus, each motive will activate all behaviors that are useful to fulfill this motive. With respect to pro-environmental behavior, the General Ecological Behavior scale (GEB) forms a class of pro-environmental behavior, and thus, measures the individual propensity to act pro-environmentally [17,30]. Similarly, also other behaviors that form a class, such as the altruism scale [31], can also be seen as an expression of a related propensity, in this case a prosocial propensity.…”

“…Among multiple factors, pro-environmental behavior is related to environmental knowledge [12][13][14], connectedness to nature [15,16], and prosocial behavior [6,7,17]. It is important to note, however, that environmental education programs commonly focus on increasing students' environmental knowledge [18,19] and promoting their sense of connectedness to nature [20,21].…”

Salivary testosterone and cortisol are jointly related to pro-environmental behavior in men

“…Pro-environmental actions are prosocial by nature insofar as they typically do no entail direct benefits for the acting individual but rather serve long-term collective interests. In the environmental psychology literature, several models have therefore integrated proenvironmental behavior into the general framework of prosocial behavior (Bamberg & Möser, 2007;Kaiser & Byrka, 2011;Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002;Stern, 2000).…”

Sustainable consumption and marketing

“…This may indicate that social distance has no direct impact on determinance of sustainability, or it may imply that a cooperative social value orientation does not cover social distance sufficiently. There is evidence that social value orientation is related to sustainability concerns (Kaiser & Byrka, 2011), which explains the effect on relevance of sustainability. There also is evidence that cooperative social value orientation mainly influences in-group behaviour rather than out-group behaviour (De Dreu, 2010).…”

“…Research on value related norm activation shows negligible effects of selftranscendent altruistic values on sacrificing personal benefits for the benefit of the environment (De Groot & Steg, 2007;Joireman et al, 2001;Joireman et al, 2004;Kaiser & Byrka, 2011;Simpson, 2006), possibly since behaviour that negatively affects the environment does not necessarily threaten altruistic values. In specific instances even an egoistic value orientation may support environmentally beneficial behaviour.…”