Abstract
In the past year, an unprecedented climate movement has risen among European youth, so-called "Fridays4Future" (F4F). Thousands of pupils skip school every Friday to protest for better climate politics. The public debate on the protests contains highly mixed reactions, including praise as well as condemnation. Recent theoretical accounts propose that people’s engagement in community service and actions towards a greater good could be related to their moral identity. Moral identity (MI) is defined as the extent to which being moral is important to the personal identity. The current preregistered study investigates the link between moral identity and participants’ support for F4F in an online survey (N = 537). Results confirm the association between participants’ moral identity and their support for F4F, with the internalization scale predicting passive forms of support and the symbolization scale predicting active forms of support. Additionally, risk perception was found to play an important role. Thus, this study confirms the role of moral identity in people’s pro-environmental engagement and offers new insights in the context of an important and timely issue.
Highlights
2019 has been the year in which thousands of young people flooded the streets and demanded adequate political action to tackle the climate crisis
We found that the symbolization scale was a significant predictor for active support (β = 0.134, t(541) = 2.78, p = .006; bootstrapped 95% CI [0.03, 0.23]), whereas the internalization scale was not (p = .74; bootstrapped 95% CI [-0.12, 0.07]) (Fig 2)
We investigated the extent to which moral identity is linked to the support of the youth climate movement Fridays for Future (F4F)
Summary
2019 has been the year in which thousands of young people flooded the streets and demanded adequate political action to tackle the climate crisis. Inspired by 15-year-old Swedish Greta Thunberg, who stopped going to school every Friday in order to protest against the insufficient political reactions to the impeding climate crisis, thousands of pupils joined the protests over the months and formed a unique and unprecedented social movement, called “Fridays for Future” (F4F). Even people who generally agree with the general demands of F4F think that F4F’s forms of actions (e.g., skipping school, blocking the main traffic knots of the big cities every week) are too radical and obstruct daily business of innocent citizens, and 21% of the general adult population indicate no sympathy at all with the protests [1]. A good number of adults even joined the protests and several new adult groups have been
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