Abstract
There is growing research interest in behavioral spillover and its potential for enabling more widespread lifestyle change than has typically been achieved through discrete behavioral interventions. There are some routes by which spillover could take place without conscious attention or explicit recognition of the connections between separate behaviors. However, in many cases there is an expectation that an individual will perceive behaviors to be conceptually related, specifically in terms of their compensatory (suppressing further action) or catalyzing (promoting further action) properties, as a prerequisite for both negative and positive spillover. Despite this, relatively little research has been carried out to assess the beliefs that may underpin spillover processes as held by individuals themselves, or to measure these directly. We develop and evaluate a survey-based instrument for this purpose, doing so in a sample of seven countries worldwide: Brazil, China, Denmark, India, Poland, South Africa, and the United Kingdom (approx. 1,000 respondents per country). This approach allows us to assess these measures and to compare findings between countries. As part of this, we consider the connections between beliefs about behavioral relationships, and other key variables such as pro-environmental identity and personal preferences. We observe higher levels of endorsement of compensatory beliefs than previous research, and even higher levels of endorsement of novel items assessing catalyzing beliefs. For the first time, we present evidence of the validity of such measures with respect to comparable constructs, and in relation to people’s consistency across different types of behaviors. We reflect on the implications of considering the relationships between behaviors in the context of people’s subjective beliefs and offer recommendations for developing this line of research in the broader context of spillover research and within a cross-cultural framework.
Highlights
Recent years have seen a growth in research that has set out to promote, understand, and test behavioral spillover in the environmental domain
In the case of some specific measures used, we observed similar levels of endorsement as comparable previous research: for example, 16.2% of respondents in the Danish sample endorsed the view that reduced car use can compensate for flying on holiday, an identical figure to that obtained for an equivalent item used by Kaklamanou et al (2015) with a United Kingdom sample
We observe a negative association between identity and compensatory beliefs; we find a positive association between catalyzing beliefs and identity
Summary
Recent years have seen a growth in research that has set out to promote, understand, and test behavioral spillover in the environmental domain. Behavioral spillover is broadly defined as an observable and causal effect one behavior has on another (Nash et al, 2017) Research in this area has been founded on an appreciation of the limited capacity for piecemeal behavior change to address urgent environmental problems (Maniates, 2001), especially through simple, low-effort individual action (Thøgersen and Crompton, 2009). The prospect that such behaviors might prompt or catalyze more widespread behavior change has generated interest in the relationship between environmentally significant behaviors, and the conditions under which one action might “spill over” to another (Defra, 2008). In order to examine these beliefs in light of the types of behavioral patterns that would be anticipated as a result of spillover processes, we examine whether and how they are linked to consistency across self-reported behaviors
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