Relationships between personal values, micro-contextual factors and residents’ pro-environmental behaviors: An explorative study

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Studies to date have shown that individual pro-environmental motivations do not always translate into pro-environmental behaviors. An important factor that modifies motivational strength is the context in which the behavior is embedded. Previous studies have largely been cross-national analyses that focus on macro-contextual factors, thus ignoring substantial variation in motivation-behavior associations at the local scale. In contrast, this study investigated the way micro-contextual mechanisms in residential areas (housing estates and communities) moderate the behavioral effects of personal values, one of the most fundamental motivations that guide individual environmental behaviors. Four contextual factors with particular attention were community environmental initiatives, social capital, local demographics, and built characteristics.The research data derived from a large-scale survey in Hangzhou, China, where community initiatives have been implemented widely to target household waste source separation. We examined our cross-level model for both waste sorting and nontarget environmental behaviors. The results showed that the associations between self-transcendent value prioritizations and waste sorting were stronger in residential areas with lower populations or community initiatives’ greater reliance on public-interest framing. Associations between value prioritizations and nontarget private behaviors were stronger in areas with lower social capital, more females, or more communal space for neighbor interactions. However, no contextual factors changed the strength of the links between value prioritizations and public behaviors. Overall, these findings highlight the significant role of micro-contextual factors in explaining the variations in motivation-behavior links. They also indicate that the characteristics of environmental behavior may moderate the dynamics between pro-environmental motivations and contextual factors further.