Abstract
Personal relative deprivation (PRD; the belief that one is worse off than other people who are similar to oneself) is associated with a reduced willingness to delay gratification, lower prosociality, and increased materialism. These results suggest that PRD may play a role in shaping people's willingness to act to protect the natural environment. We report 3 studies that investigate a possible link between PRD and pro-environmental intentions (ENV). Study 1 was an exploratory study using a US sample; Studies 2 and 3 were pre-registered replications using UK and US samples, respectively. In each study, participants self-reported PRD and ENV; they also indicated their subjective social status (where they come on a national "ladder" of social class) and reported their income, education, age, and gender/sex. All three studies found a negative correlation between PRD and ENV. However, multiple regression analyses in which ENV was regressed on PRD and all other variables simultaneously indicated that the unique effect of PRD was small and, for Studies 2 and 3, the 95% confidence intervals included zero. No other variable emerged as a clear unique predictor across all three studies. The data suggest that PRD may be associated with reduced intention to act pro-environmentally, but the causal status of this association, and its relationship to other demographic and social-status variables, remains a topic for further research.
Highlights
Given the scientific consensus that humans need to adopt more sustainable patterns of behaviour and resource use [1,2], it is important to understand the drivers of sustainable behaviour (e.g., [3,4,5,6])
As pre-registered, we applied the same meta-analytic approach to the estimated effect of Personal relative deprivation (PRD) from the other regression analyses: the results were virtually identical. These studies found some support for the idea that higher personal relative deprivation is associated with lower pro-environmental behavioural intentions: in Study 1, PRD was negatively correlated with environmental intentions (ENV), and this pattern was reproduced in two pre-registered replications
Notwithstanding the limitations of internal meta-analyses [54], the central estimate of the correlation obtained from random-effects metaanalysis indicates that PRD accounts for approximately 3% of the variance in ENV
Summary
Given the scientific consensus that humans need to adopt more sustainable patterns of behaviour and resource use [1,2], it is important to understand the drivers of sustainable behaviour (e.g., [3,4,5,6]). Callan et al [15] found that PRD was negatively correlated with social values orientation [30] and with offers made in a dictator game (see [31]) In many of these studies, PRD has been shown to have a causal effect on the outcome variable (i.e., manipulating people’s sense of their relative deprivation shifts their willingness to delay gratification, to act for the benefit of others, or their enthusiasm for material possessions), and/or PRD has been found to predict the outcome variables over and above the effects of other indicators of social status (i.e., income, education, and subjective social status). We are interested in estimating effect sizes and the uncertainty attached to those estimates (i.e., the width of confidence intervals) rather than on binary “effect vs no effect” decisions
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