Abstract
Global warming and other climate issues seriously threaten global sustainable development. As citizen environmental behavior can have a positive impact on the environment, it is of great theoretical significance and practical reference value to study the impact of psychological distance theory on citizen environmental behavior. This study obtained 2,633 related studies from 1980 to 2020 from the Web of Science as research objects, and used CiteSpace, VOSviewer, Netdraw, and other software programs to perform a bibliometric analysis, which can show the complex relationship implied in the citation, intuitively grasp the development context and hot frontier in this field, and help scholars better study citizen environmental behavior. The results and conclusions are as follows. (1) The related research covered three periods: infancy, growth, and outbreak. (2) Chronologically, the relevant research evolved from building models to analyze the impact of environmental enrichment on human environmental behavior, to studying the motivation behind citizen environmental behavior, and finally to paying attention to sustainable development. (3) A cluster analysis of high-frequency keywords identified three research hotspots: “drivers of psychological distance of environmental change perception on citizen environmental behavior,” “impact of social distance on adolescents’ behavior,” and “construal level theory and citizen green behavior.” Based on these findings, possible future research directions were identified, including changing from a single theory to a combination of multiple theories to comprehensively study citizen environmental protection behavior; analyzing the motivation of citizen environmental behavior and summarizing the general motivation of environmental behavior according to its internal relationship; and determining how to narrow the global psychological distance, strengthen the awareness of the community of human destiny, and explore the establishment of an efficient global climate cooperation mechanism.
Highlights
Since the two industrial revolutions, countries worldwide have unilaterally pursued high-speed economic growth, placing a significant burden on the environment
It is of great theoretical significance and practical reference value to use psychological distance theory to study citizen environmental behavior
The concept of psychological distance originated from Liberman and Trope’s time construction theory (Liberman and Trope, 1998, 2003) and later developed into the construal level theory, at which point psychological distance extended from time distance to space distance, social distance, and hypothetical research categories
Summary
Since the two industrial revolutions, countries worldwide have unilaterally pursued high-speed economic growth, placing a significant burden on the environment. The public can consciously protect the ecological environment, choose low-carbon travel modes, adhere to energy and resources conservation, and truly achieve a high degree of unity between environmental awareness and environmental behavior. Research concerning the motivation for environmental behavior mainly focuses on environmental attitudes, values (Mi et al, 2020), social media, and other factors It is of great theoretical significance and practical reference value to use psychological distance theory to study citizen environmental behavior. To achieve a sustainable improvement in urban air quality, citizens’ personal behavior, including the choice of daily transportation modes, must be altered to select environmentally friendly options (Chen et al, 2013)
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