Reversing or mitigating the effects of Climate Change is complicated, involving multiple levels of participants, ranging from the individual consumer to multinational companies and supranational entities. I argue that the individual who votes, consumes, lobbies and protests might be the most important of them all, thus analysing what motivates or discourages people of pro-environmental behaviour is pivotal for policymakers and social movements to give support in the most effective ways (Gifford, 2011; Shafiei & Maleksaeidi, 2020).
While there is a body of existing research to examine barriers which discourage pro-environmental behaviours (Gifford, 2011) the same is considerably lacking for motivations – in Hungary only I and my colleagues researched this topic yet (Szabó et al., 2020). This lack of exploratory work exists despite the importance of the topic to explain a portion the Attitude-Behaviour Gap (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002) – which describes the phenomenon of environmental attitudes often not culminate in pro-environmental behaviours.
During a qualitative study conducted among young Hungarian student we managed to identify 17 different motivators of pro-environmental behaviours (PEB) and classify them into 4 categories:
– Social motivators: The social acceptance signals that certain PEBs won’t have repercussions to social standing and they are supported (Cialdini et al., 1991; van Valkengoed et al., 2022). The effect of role models and social media also cannot be left out, since external, personal influences might often motivate people to be like the person they respect (Sokolova & Kefi, 2020).
– Gains motivators: The perception of PEBs as having more benefits (improved health, positive experiences, social status, more financial resources) or having less drawbacks compared to unsustainable behaviours – subjectively rational (Zannakis et al., 2019; Steg et al., 2014)
– Intrinsic, personal motivators: Is a quite broad category encompassing: Eco-emotions: study of eco-emotions is relatively new, people act in certain ways to seek out (joy, pride, feeling of belonging) or avoid (grief, guilt, anxiety) certain feelings (Brosch, 2021; Phikala, 2022); Perception of knowledge and abilities: PEBs subjectively perceived as within a person’s competencies and means will be thought as less effortful (Zannakis et al., 2019), knowledge of the state of the environment (Fielding & Head, 2012), belief in own abilities; and Environmentalist self-identity: is a defining conscious self-representation (Pronin, 2008) which if it becomes salient might even overwrite barriers (Bohner and Schlüter, 2014) since people try to act in accordance to their identity.
– Non-social external motivators: These factors often overlooked, despite many PEBs (like using public transport) require specific infrastructure (Mugio et al., 2017). Also soft (incentives) or hard (punishing) lawmaking strongly influences individual actions changing the perceived social norms and gains.
The goals of the project are twofold:
1) Using the previously outlined qualitative findings to produce a valid scale to measure how people value different motivators as characteristics of PEBs or as properties of the PEB-human interaction
2) Setting up demographic profiles by how importantly groups of people value certain characteristics and whether these relate to their actual PEBs
With this project I hope to help social sciences to better understand PEBs and their formation. Also by using the knowledge of what properties matter the utmost to certain groups of the population, more focused interventions could become available.