Going Green Is Exhausting for Dark Personalities but Beneficial for the Light Ones: An Experience Sampling Study That Examines the Subjectivity of Pro-environmental Behavior

Abstract

Study 1 examined how personality and attitudes are related to daily pro-environmental behavior (PEB) and whether these relationships are moderated by perceived behavioral costs and benefits. One hundred and seventy-eight participants responded to scales measuring the dark and light side of personality, as well as their pro-environmental attitude. Afterward, they were notified three times a day for 7 days in a row. Each time they reported their PEB that had occurred in the past four hours and indicated their behavioral costs and benefits. Multilevel analyses showed a positive relationship between the frequency of PEB and the light triad of personality and pro-environmental attitude, while the dark tetrad was negatively related to PEB. Unexpectedly, less environmentally aware participants reported to engage in PEB with higher costs and lower benefits than did pro-environmental participants. A second study (N = 159) suggests that less environmentally aware people do not actually engage in PEB with high costs and low benefits, but rather that they only perceive their behavior to be costly and of little benefit. Overall, our findings suggest that the way people perceive their daily PEB is not necessarily shared by others.

App-etizing sustainability: A multi-component app intervention targeting dietary carbon emissions informed by personal needs

“…Beyond psychopathy, other barriers and facilitators of Machiavellianism, meat attachment, and self-efficacy as well as consumer types only predicted baseline differences in CO2e, in line with previous results (Graça et al, 2015;Kesenheimer & Greitemeyer, 2022). Therewith, our results support a responsiveness effect only for psychopathy in the control group, not for other barriers and facilitators, nor for consumer types.…”

Psychedelic use predicts objective knowledge about climate change via increases in nature relatedness

“…Although difficult to study due to its complex determinants (Gifford and Nilsson, 2014), combining administration studies with an experience sampling method may dramatically increase both internal and external validity of psychedelic-pro-environmental research. While actual use will allow for causal conclusions, experience sampling is a critical method for assessing actual, as opposed to self-reported (often misreported), pro-environmental behaviour (e.g., Kesenheimer and Greitemeyer, 2022). Furthermore, the investigation of additional variables related to pro-environmental concern such as awareness of the sixth mass extinction (Ceballos et al, 2015) or human-animal relations (Caviola et al, 2019) may be worthwhile.…”

Narcissism and Pro-Environmental Behaviors: The Mediating Role of Self-Monitoring, Environmental Control and Attitudes

“…The present research aimed to analyze individual differences through the lens of narcissistic personality traits (i.e., grandiose and vulnerable narcissism) in relation to PEB, because they may create a behavioral pattern of exploitation and manipulation of surrounding resources for personal purposes, thus diminishing the individual's understanding of the importance for protecting the environment. Although recent studies investigated the relationship between narcissistic tendencies and PEB [15,16] or pro-environmental attitudes [17], the present study expands existing research by analyzing the mechanisms (i.e., self-monitoring, environmental control, and environmental attitudes) by which grandiose and vulnerable narcissistic individuals engage or not in PEB.…”