Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
DOI: 10.1002/ijop.12034
e review the personal and social influences on pro-environmental concern and behaviour, with an emphasis
on recent research. The number of these influences suggests that understanding pro-environmental concern and
behaviour is far more complex than previously thought. The influences are grouped into 18 personal and social factors.
The personal factors include childhood experience, knowledge and education, personality and self-construal, sense of
control, values, political and world views, goals, felt responsibility, cognitive biases, place attachment, age, gender
and chosen activities. The social factors include religion, urbanrural differences, norms, social class, proximity to
problematic environmental sites and cultural and ethnic variations We also recognize that pro-environmental behaviour
often is undertaken based on none of the above influences, but because individuals have non-environmental goals such
as to save money or to improve their health. Finally, environmental outcomes that are a result of these influences
undoubtedly are determined by combinations of the 18 categories. Therefore, a primary goal of researchers now should
be to learn more about how these many influences moderate and mediate one another to determine pro-environmental
behaviour.
Keywords: Personal factors; Social factors; Pro-environmental behaviour; Pro-environmental concern; Review.
Correspondence should be addressed to Robert Gifford, Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 3P5.
(E-mail: rgifford@uvic.ca).
1 For a meta-analytic study of factors in the theory of planned behavior, norm activation theory, and some additional psychosocial constructs,
see Bamberg and Moser (2007). For a comparison between value-belief-norm theory and the theory of planned behavior on energy consumption
behaviors, see Abrahamse and Steg (2011). For a review of the contribution of environmental psychology for promoting pro-environmental behavior,
including models, see Steg and Vlek (2009).
(Joireman, Van Lange, & Van Vugt, 2004), and consumption behaviours and pro-environmental intentions in
France and the U.S. (Urien & Kilbourne, 2011).
Another individual difference is the degree to which
one feels a personal relationship with the environment.
In an American study that used a modified scale adapted
from research on close relationships, greater perceived
inclusion of nature in the self predicted more engagement
in pro-environmental behaviour (Davis, Green, & Reed,
2009). This is consistent with previous research showing
that biospheric concerns are related to the degree to
which people implicitly associate themselves with nature,
as measured by a modified version of the Implicit
Association Test (IAT; Schultz, Shriver, Tabanico, &
Khazian, 2004).
Self-construal, how people relate to other people
(Markus & Kitayama, 1991), has also been examined
in relation to environmental concern and behaviour. A
Canadian study found that independent self-construal
(differentiating oneself from others) predicted egoistic
environmental concern and competitiveness in sharing
resources, interdependent self-construal (focusing on
relationships with others) predicted resource cooperation
and meta-personal self-construal (feeling fundamentally
interconnected with all living things) predicted biospheric
environmental concern, ecological cooperation and selfreports of pro-environmental conservation behaviour
(Arnocky, Stroink, & DeCicco, 2007).
Sense of control
Locus of control is a trait-like tendency that refers to
the extent to which people attribute control over events
in life more to themselves or more to external sources
(Levenson, 1973; Rotter, 1966). Presumably, individuals
with an internal locus of control actively seek out
information, including about environmental problems.
If so, they will more often acquire, and make better
use of, knowledge that is conducive to behaving in an
environment-friendly manner than those who attribute
control to external sources.
Indeed, internal locus of control has been associated
with greater willingness to purchase ecological products
in the U.S. (Schwepker & Cornwell, 1991) and to
stronger pro-environmental intentions and behaviour in
both Germany and Japan (Ando, Ohnuma, Blobaum,
Matthies, & Sugiura, 2010) as well as in Australia
(Fielding & Head, 2012), including the use of cars
for commuting in Canada (Abrahamse, Steg, Gifford,
& Vlek, 2009). Locus of control also seems to moderate
the link between values and pro-environmental behaviour
(Engqvist Jonsson & Nilsson, in press). For values to
be expressed in pro-environmental behaviour, people
apparently must perceive events to be controlled by their
own behaviour or personal characteristics. Moreover, this
is more important for people with lower levels of selftranscendence values (defined in the following section).
A similar trait-like control concept is self-efficacy,
the belief in ones capabilities to organize and
execute the courses of action required to manage
prospective situations (Bandura, 1977). A sense of
self-efficacy facilitates recycling behaviour in mainland
China (Tang, Chen, & Luo, 2011) and in Spain
(Tabernero & Hernandez, 2011), Pro-environmental
consumer behaviour in Thailand (Rice, Wongtada, &
Leelakulthanit, 1996), electricity conservation among
Danish consumers (Thgersen & Grnhj, 2010),
political activism for environmental causes in the U.S.
(Lubell, 2002), as well as various other pro-environmental
behaviours (Meinhold & Malkus, 2005; Walton & Austin,
2011).
Values, political views and worldviews
Many studies that investigate environmental concern
and behaviour as a function of values employ a
theory proposed by Schwartz (1992). In it, human
values are said to be structured in two motivational
dimensions: Openness to Change versus Conservation
and Self-Enhancement versus Self-Transcendence. The
latter dimension in particular has been associated with
environmental concern, because it taps the tendency to
enhance ones own interest versus the extent to which
one transcends selfish concerns to promote the welfare of
others and nature.
Building on this theory, later studies have modified the
original value system to fit environmental issues (Stern,
Dietz, Kalof, & Guagnano, 1995; Stern, Dietz, & Kalof,
1993) and support for the categorization of values into
biospheric, egocentric and altruistic dimensions has been
found (De Groot & Steg, 2007, 2008). In contrast to
Schwartz theory, values that concern the environment
(biospheric) in this approach are distinguished from other
self-transcendent values, such as altruistic values. Not
surprisingly, persons who hold more self-transcendent
and biospheric values report being more environmentally
concerned, and the opposite is true for those who hold
self-enhancement and egocentric values (e.g., Milfont &
Gouveia, 2006; Nilsson, von Borgstede, & Biel, 2004;
Nordlund & Garvill, 2002; Schultz & Zelezny, 1999;
Stern, 2000; Stern et al., 1995). The same relations apply
for environmental behaviour (e.g., Karp, 1996; Thgersen
& Olander,
2002), although the relations are typically
weak and moderating and mediating variables such as
personal norms and beliefs are needed to satisfactorily
predict behaviour from values (Nordlund & Garvill,
2003).
Values have also been considered in terms of
orientations towards self and others (Messick &
McClintock, 1968). Individuals with cooperative (prosocial) orientations emphasize joint gains between
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the basis of a sample comprising 186 societies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (Divale, Khaltourina, & Korotayev, 2002).
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