Abstract
Solving environmental problems relies upon cultivating pro-environmental behavior in the society. While the internet has been widely used to facilitate information transmission and communication, it’s important to understand its function in promoting pro-environmental behavior. Using the data from the China General Social Survey 2013, the relationship between the use of internet and the individual’s pro-environmental behavior is investigated, and overall positive effects are found. The results show that, the influence of internet use is more pronounced on the private pro-environmental behavior when further dividing pro-environmental behavior into private and public types. Moreover, the positive effect of internet use on pro-environmental behavior is more pronounced among low-income and female groups, compared to middle to high income and male counterparts, respectively, when considering the heterogeneity across different groups of individuals. We further explore the plausible channels of providing information, encouraging participation in pro-environmental campaigns and improving social relationships through which internet use facilitates pro-environmental behavior.
Highlights
Various environmental problems such as global warming, water shortage and noise have posed threats to environmental sustainability [1]
We further explore the plausible channels of providing information, encouraging participation in pro-environmental campaigns and improving social relationships through which internet use facilitates proenvironmental behavior
In order to identify the heterogeneous effects of internet use on pro-environmental behavior, we further investigate the effects across groups of different income, gender and location
Summary
Various environmental problems such as global warming, water shortage and noise have posed threats to environmental sustainability [1]. Since these problems are largely rooted in human behaviors [2, 3], it is essential to understand how to influence and change human behaviors toward environmental issues [4, 5], especially in the current internet era. The pro-environmental behavior refers to the kind of behavior that benefits the environment or at least not harms the environment [6] Factors such as information, knowledge, education, social relations, social support, social participation and motivation all play important roles in encouraging pro-environmental behavior [7,8,9,10,11]. The more recent trend of mobile internet use has developed rapidly with 454
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