Wives influence climate change mitigation behaviours in married-couple households: insights from Taiwan

Abstract

Mitigating climate change requires collective action of various sectors and on multiple scales, including individual behavioural changes among citizens. Although numerous studies have examined factors that influence individuals' mitigation behaviours, much less attention has been given to interpersonal influence. Children have been suggested to influence parents' climate change concerns; however, how the interactions between couples-typically the primary decision-makers in marriedcouple households-influence each other's climate change concerns has seldom been discussed. In this study, we surveyed married heterosexual couples to investigate the interdependency of husbands' and wives' motivations for behavioural change to mitigate climate change. We found that wives' psychological constructs, including climate change risk perception, self-efficacy, and gender role attitudes, demonstrated stronger effects on their husbands' motivation than did husbands' own constructs on their own motivation, whereas husbands' psychological constructs did not influence their wives' motivation. Our results suggest the importance of wives' role in motivating household climate change mitigation behaviours.

Comparing the effects of climate change labelling on reactions of the Taiwanese public

“…Identifying the reasons for this behaviour among men requires further investigation, but identity-protective cognition 36 , in which men express risk scepticism because of their individualistic worldviews, provides a possible explanation. In addition, the finding that women exhibited greater behavioural intention to mitigate climate change when the ‘climate crisis’ label was used than when the ‘climate change’ label was used is similar to the gender differences observed for climate change 27 , 37 , which revealed positive effects for using the term ‘climate crisis’. In terms of labelling effect differences according to worldview, a backlash effect was observed in people with hierarchical worldviews when the ‘climate crisis’ label 20 was used because they had a lower sense of collective efficacy for the ‘climate crisis’ label.…”

Climate Change Mitigation in Households between Market Failures and Psychological Barriers

“…Awareness, personal, and social norms were found to be equally important as monetary factors [91]. The study by Hung and Bayrak [92] found that interdependency of husbands and wives' motivations for behavioral change to climate change mitigation also plays an important role in climate change mitigation behavior of the household. Perceived knowledge and financial self-efficacy as well as other behavioral factors were found as having significant influence on households' climate change mitigation behavior in Mexican households [93,94].…”

“…Especially in dealing with renewables [89] and energy efficiency [90] barriers in households. Recent studies [91][92][93][94][95] on climate mitigation behaviors identified the other non-economic drivers of climate change mitigation behavior are much more important but not properly addressed in shaping policies. Awareness, personal, and social norms were found to be equally important as monetary factors [91].…”

Taking gender ideologies seriously in climate change mitigation: a case study of Taiwan

“…However, the relationship between gender ideologies, which critically shapes individual behaviors (Chatillon et al, 2018;Knight and Brinton, 2017), and individual motivation to mitigate climate change is poorly understood (Hung and Bayrak, 2019). Gender ideologies denote "sets of widely taken-for-granted cultural beliefs about the essential natures and relative worth of men and women" (Chatillon et al, 2018: 217).…”

“…Based on the discussion in the previous paragraph, individual gender ideologies and motivation to mitigate climate change are theoretically connected; however, few studies have examined this linkage. To the best of our knowledge, the study by Hung and Bayrak (2019) is the only one to explore this relationship. In their study of Taiwanese married couples, neither the husbands' nor the wives' gender ideologies affected their motivations, and the husbands' gender ideologies did not influence the wives' motivations.…”