Abstract
Previous research about social dilemmas has identified cooperation as a possible underlying facilitator of proenvironmental behavior. However, there has been no discussion about how manipulating cooperation and competition could influence environmental action experimentally. The current study filled this gap in previous literature by manipulating cooperation and competition in a group of 155 participants and comparing their respective environmental actions. Participants were randomly placed into one of three conditions and primed by writing a short passage regarding a significant personal experience where they acted cooperatively, competitively, or neutrally. It was found that those in the cooperative priming group scored significantly higher on environmental participatory action than people in the competitive priming group. However, no difference was found on environmental leadership action. The results indicated that participatory environmental actions are relatively easier to change, as the threshold for interest in them is much lower than leadership environmental actions.
Highlights
The interest surrounding issues of sustainability and the environment is growing in today’s psychological research
Researchers in psychology and sustainability science have studied the connection between cooperation and environmental issues using the theory of social dilemmas [5,6,7]
A post hoc Least Significant Difference (LSD) test on the priming groups revealed that people in the cooperative priming group scored marginally higher on environmental action than people in the competitive priming group (p = 0.049)
Summary
The interest surrounding issues of sustainability and the environment is growing in today’s psychological research. Researchers in psychology and sustainability science have studied the connection between cooperation and environmental issues using the theory of social dilemmas [5,6,7]. People tend to view environmentally conscious individuals as cooperative, prosocial, and self-transcendent [7,8,9,10], because their decisions are beneficial for both the environment and the individual. Past studies have validated the relationship between the social values of cooperation and competition and concerns for environmental issues, and many studies have examined personal preference for cooperation or competition (e.g., social value orientation) in relation to proenvironmental behavior. The present study examines the causal relationship between a social dilemma (cooperation versus competition) and proenvironmental actions by priming individual autobiographical cooperative/competitive memories
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