How Will I Be Remembered? Conserving the Environment for the Sake of One’s Legacy

Abstract

Long time horizons and social distance are viewed as key psychological barriers to proenvironmental action, particularly regarding climate change. We suggest that these challenges can be turned into opportunities by making salient long-term goals and motives, thus shifting preferences between the present self and future others. We tested whether individuals' motivation to leave a positive legacy can be leveraged to increase engagement with climate change and other environmental problems. In a pilot study, we found that individual differences in legacy motivation were positively associated with proenvironmental behaviors and intentions. In a subsequent experiment, we demonstrated that priming legacy motives increased donations to an environmental charity, proenvironmental intentions, and climate-change beliefs. Domain-general legacy motives represent a previously understudied and powerful mechanism for promoting proenvironmental behavior.

Cooperation and Competition Impact Environmental Action: An Experimental Study in Social Dilemmas

“…A situation in which immediate selfish competitive interests and long-term cooperative interests are at odds is considered a social dilemma. Therefore, examining environmental issues through the lens of a social dilemma could illuminate the relationship between cooperation and environmentalism [24,25].…”

“…to later trigger unconscious memories or actions. In fact, Zaval, Markowitz, and Weber [25] successfully primed participants to have an increased propensity to donate to environmentally related issues. They asked participants to write a short essay describing what the participants wish to be remembered for, an exercise designed to prime participants to have stronger legacy motives.…”

“…Participants were primed by writing narrative stories. This priming method has been used in recent environmental psychological studies [25]. It was expected that, if participants were primed by writing cooperative stories, they would score higher in environmental action.…”

“…Specifically, autobiographic memory could facilitate associations wherein episodes are associated by the same or similar content [30]. This method has been applied to previous research in environmental psychology [25]. Our design paralleled this concept; it was expected that recalling a significant cooperative or competitive life event could cause associations of cooperative or competitive thoughts.…”

Physical and Cultural Inheritance Enhance Agency, but What are the Origins of this Concern to Establish a Legacy? A Nationally-Representative Twin Study of Erikson’s Concept of Generativity

“…Specifically, we examine “generativity”, defined as the desire to leave a positive legacy and accompanying activities that raise outcomes for future generations (Erikson 1963; McAdams et al 1993). Sustaining the future has been identified as key to the welfare of future generations (Hauser et al 2014) and legacy is an important motive for altruistic behavior (Zaval et al 2015), but individual differences have been less well studied.…”