Scalable psychological solutions to environmental problems.

<p><strong>The IPCC states in its latest, 6th synthesis report that human activities have ‘unequivocally’ resulted in a rise in the surface temperature of the earth, inducing changes in the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and biosphere which have had adverse effects on both the natural world and humanity (IPCC, 2023). In order to limit warming to 1.5oC, the IPCC posits that annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must decrease by 45% of their 2010 levels by 2030, and drop to net zero by 2050 (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2019). At present, 65% of global GHG emissions can be directly and indirectly linked to consumption within households (Ivanova et al., 2016). Consequently, individuals can have a profound effect on the levels of GHG’s emitted into the atmosphere. Thus, changing individual behaviour within households represents a significant leverage point (Ivanova et al., 2016; Pörtner et al., 2022). It is known that further actions may be taken by individuals to reduce the carbon footprint of households (Hall et al., 2018; Steg, 2018). However, it remains unclear how to induce individuals to undertake such additional pro-environmental behaviours.</strong></p><p>Currently, climate change policies have recruited economic understandings of behaviour to design interventions that incorporate fiscal motivations and deterrents as part of their structure (Cooper, 2011). For example, emission trading schemes (ETS), initially envisaged within the Kyoto Protocol, have been separately engineered in different regions of the world (Leining et al., 2020; Skjærseth & Wettestad, 2008; X.-Q. Wang et al., 2022). These policies have had negative consequences in the form of furthering existing inequities between countries (Liverman, 2009), as well as issues in quantifying their additionality as compared to a business-as-usual scenario (Teixidó et al., 2019; Verde, 2020). Furthermore, ETS are necessarily targeted at the social actors who participate in the engineered markets, rendering such policies ineffective for directly targeting the 65% of global GHG emissions embodied in individual/household behaviours.</p><p>The research in this PhD steps away from economic understandings of (environmental) behaviour, to explore the utility of other conceptualizations of human action. The work done here examines theories from environmental psychology and behavioural economics, to explore how psychological phenomena such as attitudes, and binds on rationality such as the recruitment of heuristics, direct decision making in relation to environmental issues. By examining alternative drivers of behaviour, it is hoped that different environmental policies directly targeting behaviour within households could be designed in the future.</p><p>Prior to the work undertaken here, the multitude of hypothesised determinates of environmental behaviour precluded the effective integration of alternative perspectives from environmental psychology and behavioural economics into policy discourses. As Shove (2010, pp. 1275) pointed put there was no ‘obvious limit to the number of possible determinants and no method of establishing their…precise role in promoting or preventing different behaviours’. Through the course of this research, multiple models of human behaviour from within and between the disciplines of environmental psychology and behavioural economics have been interrogated. These models have been examined in relation to both self-reported and observed measures of individuals’ environmental action, in an effort to delimit the critical determinates of pro-environmental behaviour - and curtail the number of possible pre-cursors lamented by Shove.</p><p>The first set of studies undertaken as part of this doctoral research focused on models of behaviour from environmental psychology. The numeracy of the models recruited within environmental psychology to explain behaviour ensured there existed considerable redundancy between these concerning the variables they incorporated into their structures. For example, biospheric values are cited in the norm activation model (Schwartz, 1977), value belief norm theory (Stern, 2000), and recent models concerning an individual’s connection to nature (Martin & Czellar, 2017). Work was initially undertaken to create a database documenting solely the variables from within these models. This was done for clarity, and to eliminate the aforementioned redundancy. Individual meta-analyses were run for each of the psychological variables to generate an effect size estimate for each. Effects size estimates were then compared between the psychological variables, to determine which of these correlated most strongly with pro-environmental actions and intentions. The five key variables with the largest (lower-bound) effect size estimates for both pro-environmental intentions and behaviour were revealed to be: attitudes, perceived behavioural control, injunctive norms, descriptive norms, and personal moral norms. Following the meta-analyses, an online study was run to investigate whether participants’ reported: attitudes, perceived behavioural control, injunctive norms, descriptive norms, and personal moral norms, were related to an observed (as opposed to a self-reported) measure of pro-environmental action. This was done to determine whether the results obtained in the meta-analyses were robust when participants could not simply report their own actions. In the online study, participants were asked how much (real) money they would like to donate to an environmental charity (the ‘Clean Air Task Force’), to observed directly whether they behaved in alignment with their proclaimed environmental beliefs, attitudes and norms. Regression analyses and structural equation modelling revealed that personal moral norms were the most critical antecedent to the observed measure of pro-environmental behaviour, with attitudes and injunctive norms also demonstrating strong relationships with monetary donations. Perceived behavioural control and descriptive norms did not demonstrate a significant direct association with participants’ charitable donation behaviours.</p><p>In a final online experiment, insights regarding human behaviour from behavioural economics were introduced. The experiment took place over two time points. At the first point in time, the three psychological variables that previously exhibited significant direct relationships with participants’ observed monetary donations (attitudes, injunctive norms and personal norms), were elicited from participants’, and their influence over behaviour was assessed in comparison with the effects of a social norms nudge. This investigation was undertaken to evaluate whether critical ingrained psychological variables (attitudes, injunctive norms and personal norms) were associated with environmental behaviour to a lesser or greater extent than an applied nudge, which manipulated the salient social norm and thus operated through the activation of a simple imitation heuristic within participants. At the second point in time the longevity of the effect of the social norms manipulation was investigated. This was done by comparing the subsequent behaviour of participants who were, and were not, exposed to the social norm nudge in part one. At time two, behaviour was evaluated in relation to the same action as before, and also in relation to a second action from a different domain of environmental behaviour. Discrepancies between participants’ who had, or had no prior exposure to the social norms manipulation at time one, were used to comment on the temporal and behavioural spillover effects of the social norms manipulation. At the first point in time, only the three psychological variables (attitudes, injunctive norms and personal norms) exhibited a significant association with the observed environmental behaviour. No effect over behaviour of the social norms nudge was observed at time one. The lack of significant influence demonstrated by the social norms nudge at time one, portended the lack of spillover effects detected for the nudge at time two. This research demonstrated the central importance of personal moral norms, attitudes, and injunctive norms for determining individuals’ substantive pro-environmental behaviours. This thesis advanced previous work by (i) using meta-analyses to summarise and compare the relationships between numerous heterogeneous psychological determinates of pro-environmental action, and self-reported environmental intentions and behaviours; (ii) advancing theory by using structural equation modelling to demonstrated that personal moral norms were more closely affiliated with an observed measure of environmental behaviour than other variables such as attitudes; and (iii) revealing the critical determinates of pro-environmental action in order to design appropriately targeted behaviour change intervention policies: the variables that most closely correlated with observed pro-environmental acts were not nudge interventions, but instead individuals internalised moral norms and attitudes. The results of this work are necessarily limited to some extent by the methodological decisions made in service of achieving the ambitions of this doctoral research. The chosen observed behaviour (charitable giving), the selected nudge (provision of information concerning a social norm), and the techniques used to elicit participant responses (online questionnaire), all represent valid techniques and constraints on the broader applicability of my findings. These should be taken into consideration when extrapolating any results of this work to alternative scenarios.</p>

New methodology for the ecological footprint with an application to the New Zealand economy

Financial incentives to poor countries promote net emissions reductions in multilateral climate agreements

The issue of plastic waste is a serious social, economic, and cultural issue. Many efforts have been made to reduce the use of disposable food containers and the environmental impact of plastic waste. This study aims to provide an overview of pro-environmental behavior in the context of the daily use of reusable cups. The literature review evaluated 53 scientific papers from Scopus, Publish or Perish and citation searches, released from 2014 to 2024, to analyze drivers, mediating factors, moderating factors, and outcomes related to the daily use of reusable containers. The study identifies key contextual, situational, psychological, and demographic factors influencing the daily use of reusable containers. It also highlights enablers and barriers to adopting this habit, such as environmental messaging, social norms, and financial incentives. The research provides a comprehensive overview of the enabler and barrier factors as well as other factors that influence the use of reusable containers and suggests that the impact of these factors can be understood through the stimuli-organism-response framework. Our findings add to the understanding of drivers that encourage pro-environmental behavior. Policymakers can use these insights to design more effective interventions to promote reusable container use, such as implementing financial incentives or stricter regulations on single-use plastics. Businesses can use these findings to align their marketing strategies with consumer preferences and behaviors related to environmental sustainability.

Today's climate change is a major problem and challenge for the global environment and human civilization, and it can lead to dramatical floods over specific regions. As climate change intensifies, climate change adaptation strategies, such as flood insurance, energy taxes, and other risky financial strategies, have drawn worldwide attention and discussion. Risk control methods have been widely used to mitigate the impact of climate change on past flood losses, but past risk control strategies on climate change have not focused on the exploration of the relationship between environment, society, and humans. Based on the theoretical model of pro-environmental behavior, this study compares and analyzes four theoretical models and proposes a modified competitiveness model to effectively predict the pro-environmental behavior of college students with partial least squares (PLS) manner. Social norm could play a dominant role of mediator between risk perception, place attachment, and pro-environmental behavior. Although risk perception and local attachment are positively related to risk financial strategy, the promotion of social norms will increase the intention of risk financial strategy. For intention of risk financial strategies within pro-environmental behavior, the efficiency of enhancing local attachment was higher than that of risk perception.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand the influence of individual and organisational factors on pro-environmental behaviours of the employees at the workplace.Design/methodology/approachA model explaining pro-environmental behaviours at workplace has been proposed based on contemporary literature related to value-belief-norm (VBN) theory, corporate environmentalism framework and norm. A cross-sectional survey was carried out in 20 manufacturing organisations in India and 383 useful individual responses were collected. The proposed model has been tested with the help of structural regression analysis.FindingsThe results of the study show that both individual characteristics as well as organisational efforts influence employees’ pro-environmental behaviours. However, the effect varies as per the type of behaviour. Personal norm mediates the relationship between subjective social norm and two types of pro-environmental behaviours.Research limitations/implicationsAn individual faces subjective or objective constraints while exhibiting pro-environmental behaviours. The effect of subjective or the objective constraint needs to be explored in future studies.Originality/valueTo explain pro-environmental behaviours at workplace the authors tested VBN theory, as it was overlooked till date in management literature. It also contributes to the VBN literature by extending it to include organisational variables like corporate environmentalism and social psychological variable like social norm.

With regard to the factors influencing pro-environmental behavior, environmental sociology has long been mired in the theoretical debate between the affluence hypothesis and global environmentalism in the West. This study explores the mechanisms influencing pro-environmental behaviors by applying social capital theory. Drawing upon the data from the Chinese General Social Survey in 2013 (CGSS2013), this study distinguishes social capital in two dimensions—individual social capital (ISC) and collective social capital (CSC)—and classifies pro-environmental behaviors into two categories: private and public. With a multiple linear regression model, the report reveals that ISC, based on network learning, social support, and social identity, and CSC, based on social norms and social trust, have significant positive effects on both private and public pro-environmental behaviors. The effect of CSC on pro-environmental behavior is much lower than that of ISC. In addition, females are more likely to perform private pro-environmental behaviors than males. This paper argues that social capital should be actively used to promote civic engagement in China’s environmental protection process.

The aim of this study was to analyze the perceived self and collective efficacy, individual and social norms and feelings related to environmental health concern among a sample of Pakistanis who are (or are not) engage in pro- environment behaviors in their daily lives. An ad hoc questionnaire with scales on pro-environmental behavior, self and collective efficacy, individual and social norms, and environmental health concerns was administered to adults in Lahore, Pakistan, and 833 respondents (62% males and 38% females) responded. Analysis of our research data shows that among those who engaged in daily pro-environmental behaviors, perceptions of individual and social norms and individual and collective efficacy were positively associated with concern for the environment and health. This study offers some interesting ideas that could be useful in developing federal, regional, local and community policies to promote daily pro-environmental behaviors. For example, in addition to advocating for environmental health and reducing one’s ecological footprint, social communication could explain that caring about environmental health (and thus adopting daily pro-environmental behaviors) is a way to manage one’s mental health. In this way, circular behavior is encouraged, which not only benefits the environment and the community, but also brings personal benefits.

Human-environment interactions are increasingly strained by unsustainable consumption patterns shaped by cultural values and social norms. Materialism, defined as prioritizing possessions and financial success, has been consistently linked to lower environmental concern and reduced engagement in pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs). However, PEBs are not uniform: private behaviors (e.g., personal conservation) and public behaviors (e.g., advocacy, group participation) may have distinct determinants, including social visibility and status considerations. This study examined material values, environmental attitudes, and both private and public PEBs among medical students in Alexandria, a coastal Mediterranean city, using a cross-sectional survey with quota sampling. Students reported moderate materialism, high environmental attitudes, moderate private PEBs, and low public PEBs. Bivariate analyses indicated negative associations between material values (MV) and environmental attitudes and private PEBs, while public PEBs were linked to sociodemographic factors and MV. Regression models revealed that private PEBs were predicted by nationality and MV-centrality, whereas public PEBs-including environmental group membership, donations to environmental groups, and attendance of conferences on environmental issues-were differentially associated with MV orientations and cultural background. These findings highlight domain-specific determinants of environmental behavior and underscore the importance of embedding sustainability education and experiential engagement in medical curricula, tailored to diverse socio-cultural and economic contexts, to foster environmentally responsible practices among future healthcare professionals.

Unintended Consequences of Health Care Legislation

Painting the fence: Social norms as economic incentives to non-automotive travel behavior

Over the last 30 years, Spain has witnessed great economic growth. Nevertheless, in spite of an increasing degree of environmental concern, environmentally friendly attitudes and behaviours are still clearly below the European average. In this context, this paper analyses the impact of personal control and attitudes, and of certain socio-demographic, economic and political variables in the development of two environmentally friendly behaviours in Spain: consumption and purchase. The data were provided by a survey carried out in 2007 by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (Centre for Sociological Research) in Spain. The results show the importance of personal control, level of environmental information, political ideology, age and educational level variables to explaining the development of pro-environmental-related consumption behaviours. Personal attitudes, work situation, female gender and level of environmental information influence pro-environmental purchase behaviour in a positive way. Taking into account that personal attitudes are more determining of pro-environmental purchase than consumption behaviour, policy measures such as informal education, tax measures, social and individual norms and interpersonal and institutional trust are discussed to increase the development of pro-environmental behaviours in Spain.

Is Sin Always a Sin? The Interaction Effect of Social Norms and Financial Incentives on Market Participants’ Behavior

It is generally argued that the current state of degradation to environment is predominantly due to lack of appropriate human behaviour. Members of the civil society are slowly awakening to the ill-effects of inefficient waste disposal and are trying to contribute to the well-being and maintenance of the world we live in. While rules and regulations have been formulated by the governing bodies for segregating waste, efforts in this direction have not translated into a veritable pro-environmental behaviour among citizens. Pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) refers to behaviour that benefits the environment or harms the environment as little as possible. Many social processes and norms exert influence over our behavior. According to a popular thesis on human behaviour, known as the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), an individual's intention towards behavior, subjective norms and perceived control over his/her behaviour together leads to intentions and behavior [1]. School children exhibit a responsibility to induce changes in social norms for environmental friendly behaviours and are also natural early adopters of technology in this endeavor. We explore the use of persuasive technologies where behaviour-oriented design techniques are employed to change behaviors of users through persuasion and social influence. In this paper, we propose an approach for designing persuasive technologies for stoking pro-environmental behaviour and initiating waste segregation at source.

The consumption of meat and dairy products raise enormous environmental concerns. Circa 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from the livestock industry originate from beef, milk and pork production. Changing the production and consumption of meat and dairy products is considered to offer an important contribution to achieving the Paris Agreement climate targets (UNFCCC, 2015), and could reduce the import of soybean meal to Europe from countries where it is linked with deforestation. However, individual diet substitutions may have indirect and unintended environmental consequences across interlinked livestock systems – hence a wider assessment of impacts of consumption changes is required using consequential life cycle assessment (LCA). In this study, we investigated the environmental consequences of two independent yet interconnected diet choices in a German context: (i) replacing dairy milk with soy milk, and; (ii) replacing beef meatballs with pea protein balls. We related commodity demand to detailed agricultural rotations and land use changes via farm scale economic modelling coupled with consequential LCA. The substitution of beef meatballs with pea-derived protein balls can result in GHG savings of 2.4 kg CO2e per 100 g serving, and up to 7.3 kg CO2e per 100 g serving if spared land is afforested. Environmental problems related to nutrient leakage such as acidification and eutrophication are also mitigated. Meanwhile, unless accompanied by dramatic reductions in beef consumption, the substitution of cow milk with soy-based milk does not lead to significant GHG mitigation owing to the displacement of dairy-beef production to less efficient suckler-beef systems. Nonetheless, land sparing by cow milk substitution could support overall GHG mitigation if combined with afforestation. This study confirms that legumes can play an important role in diet transitions towards climate neutrality, especially via substitution of meat (as opposed to dairy) products.