Abstract
Climate change mandates us to understand why individuals do (not) behave pro-environmentally and personality traits are well suited for this purpose. Past research has mostly focused on how broad domain-level personality traits were associated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. In two datasets (N=501 and 287), we examined whether personality facets provided a more detailed picture of how personality traits were associated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. It was found that some facets were the main drivers of domain-level associations. Furthermore, it was found that facets, collectively, predicted pro-environmental attitudes (r=.50 to .52) and behaviors (r=.29 to .42) in holdout datasets. This predictive ability was on par with the predictive ability of domains. Therefore, facets provided a greater understanding of how personality traits were associated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Furthermore, facets provided a similar predictive ability of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors to that of domains.
Highlights
Conservation psychology aims to (a) understand why people do behave in a pro-environmental manner and (b) identify ways to promote pro-environmental behaviors (Clayton & Brook, 2005)
This study aimed to explore whether facets provided a more detailed picture of how pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors were associated with personality traits, above and beyond the Big Five domains
If the findings were consistent across datasets, meta-analytic associations would be calculated, with correlations weighted by the inverse of their standard errors combined; and we would focus our interpretations on the meta-analytic findings. This process would achieve our first aim of understanding if facet-level information provided a greater understanding, compared to domain-level information, of how personality traits were associated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors
Summary
Conservation psychology aims to (a) understand why people do (not) behave in a pro-environmental manner and (b) identify ways to promote pro-environmental behaviors (Clayton & Brook, 2005). It is possible that greater aesthetic appreciation of nature motivates a desire to preserve the environment (e.g., Hirsh & Dolderman, 2007) Another aspect of Openness that has appeared to be consistently associated with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors is intellectual curiosity (Boeve-de Pauw, Donche, & Van Petegem, 2011; Brick & Lewis, 2016; Markowitz et al, 2012). It is perhaps a drive for knowledge as well as a greater understanding of humanity’s impact on nature that pushes people to be pro-environmental. We trained the prediction model in one sample and applied it in the other to test the accuracy of the predictions
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