The Tree Task: An Incentivized, One-shot Decision Task to Measure Pro-environmental Behavior

Let's Think About the Future: The Effect of Positive and Negative Future Primes on Pro-Environmental Behavior

“…In the third part, we used an incentivized experimental task to measure pro-environmental behavior (Essl et al, 2023). Participants received an endowment of GBP 0.86 (about USD 1.15) and had to decide to keep the money or invest all or part of it in planting trees.…”

“…Furthermore, we show that people primed on leisure activities develop a more present-related mental concept than people primed on future events and that serious-related thoughts are most frequent when primed on negative future events. Finally, from a methodological point of view, we measure pro-environmental behavior with an incentivized decision task with true environmental consequences (Essl et al, 2023). Thus far, environmental priming experiments have often relied on self-reports and questionnaires as dependent variables.…”