Abstract

Due to the societal dissemination of digital technology, people are increasingly experiencing environmental topics through digital media channels such as social networks. Several researchers therefore have proposed these channels as a possibility to strengthen sustainable development based on their cost-efficient nature. But while prior studies have investigated isolated factors for understanding environmental social media behavior, there is still scarce understanding of the relevant underlying motivational factors and possible connections with more traditional environmental behaviors. Therefore, the present study applied the established socio-psychological model of goal-directed behavior and compared the desires for liking as a fundamental form of digital social media behavior with the desires for two traditional environmental behaviors (money donation and volunteering) in a cross-sectional research design. Within the biodiversity conservation case of the Andean bear (Tremarctos ornatus) in Ecuador, we compared the antecedents for the desires for the corresponding environmental behaviors (RQ1) as well as their connections between each other (RQ2). Within a sample of 407 Ecuadorian students (Mage = 20.94 years, SD = 2.25, 61.2% female), we found the marginal effect of perceived behavioral control on the desires for liking on social media as the main difference concerning the antecedents of the behaviors because money donation and volunteering largely depended on personal resources such as time or money. Furthermore, gender emerged as the second main difference between the behaviors due to it only being predictive for the liking motivation. Enjoyment was the only variable that coherently predicted all three behaviors. Finally, desires for liking on social media predicted both other behaviors in robust regression analyses, but were only predictive for volunteering in corresponding path models. The results illustrate how cost-efficient digital environmental behaviors such as liking may be suitable for sparking low-level environmental action, which may entail more pronounced forms of environmental activism, at least when they involve feasible personal costs. Overall, the findings are in line with prior research regarding the less demanding nature of liking, but further elaborate on the importance of gender for digital environmental behavior and correlates between digital and classical environmental behaviors.

Highlights

  • While direct nature experiences are decreasing (Soga and Gaston, 2016), people experience social media sites as a source of information about environmental topics (Cheung et al, 2015)

  • We addressed the following second research question: RQ2: What are the connections between environmental liking on social media and the classical environmental behaviors of money donation as well as volunteering?

  • Our study enabled for a comparison between the desires of liking on social media and two other more classical environmental behaviors, and found specific differences and connections based on the selected theoretical framework

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Summary

Introduction

While direct nature experiences are decreasing (Soga and Gaston, 2016), people experience social media sites as a source of information about environmental topics (Cheung et al, 2015) Based on this development, researchers have begun to investigate the role of new media channels for purposes of nature conservation. To investigate the possibilities of environmental social media usage, several studies have utilized existing social networking data to investigate content, places, or agents of environmental posts (Di Minin et al, 2015) Based on their post hoc nature and dependence on publicly available data (van der Sloot et al, 2016), these analyses often stay isolated on specific factors. This isolation may neglect the variety of motivationally relevant psychological factors for environmental behavior (Gifford and Nilsson, 2014), explaining why environmental psychologists still have scarce understanding about environmental behavior in virtual environments (Gifford, 2014)

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