Recycling as Altruistic Behavior

Abstract

Experimental and survey data were gathered from residents of a large urban neighborhood with a community wide curbside recycling program in order to determine the extent to which recycling could be conceptualized as altruistic behavior. Results confirmed that recycling behavior is consistent with Schwartz's altruism model, according to which behavior is influenced by social norms, personal norms, and awareness of consequences. Data further showed that a block-leader program, in which residents encouraged their neighbors to recycle, influenced altruistic norms and increased recycling behavior. Prompting and information strategies were also introduced into the community recycling program as experimental interventions in order to com- pare their effects with the block-leader approach. Results showed that prompting and information increased recycling behavior but did not affect norms and attitudes. Further- more, all the intervention strategies influenced behavior independently of the measured norms; block leaders had the most substantial impact, prompts had the next greatest impact, and information had the least.

The Influence of Environmental Friendliness on Green Trust: The Mediation Effects of Green Satisfaction and Green Perceived Quality

“…Previous literature uses values as factors determining environmentally friendly behavior (EFB) on the application of the altruistic behavior concept [15]. Many prior studies apply personal norms, feelings of moral obligation, and altruism to explore behaviors related to energy saving [16], recycling [17], and taking action in environment protection [18].…”

Flying in the face of environmental concern: why green consumers continue to fly

“…Habits pertaining to other travel modes are also hard to change (Nilsson & Küller, 2000;Tait, Laing, & Gray, 2014) raising questions about the habitual nature of travel decisions and the social identity associated with specific modes of transport. However, ideas around raising hypocrisy are worth pursuing because they may provide the key to lasting and meaningful change (Aronson, 1992;Dickerson et al, 1992;Fointiat, 2004;Hing et al, 2002) in a way that information providing alone has not done (Hopper & Nielsen, 1991). Nevertheless, education and information campaigns have a role to play in raising awareness and therefore can affect attitude formation.…”

Environmental Concern Behaviours in Africa: An Exploratory Study

“…This behaviour is thus driven by a personal norm, such as altruism, and this in turn has effect on both environmental attitudes and actions such as recycling (Stern et al, 2005;Vining & Ebreo, 1990). Hopper and Nielsen (1991) suggest that recycling reflects altruism, and that the altruism model is appropriate when examining recycling behaviour. In the case of recycling, behaviour can be regarded as altruistic, as the customer invests time and effort to advantage someone else (either the recycler or the organisation itself) without receiving any kind of compensation.…”

“…For engaging in this behaviour, the consumer experiences a number of intrinsic benefits. These include a feeling of impacting on the environment for the 'common good' of society (Hopper & Nielsen, 1991;Huge Brodin & Anderson, 2008), as well as the ability of future generations to enjoy the environment. From the theories mentioned above, the role of attitudes, knowledge and contextual factors in environmental behaviour can be identified as some of the key drivers of behaviour.…”