Abstract
Social preferences like social value orientation are considered a promising solution to social dilemmas, such as mitigating anthropogenic climate change. However, evidence on the relationship between social preferences and environmental concerns is mixed, possibly because these constructs have commonly been measured by distinct methods that do not facilitate direct comparisons. We address this gap by introducing an incentivized preference-based measurement approach, extending a subject’s concerns for the wellbeing of others to a subject’s willingness to support environmental and humanitarian endeavors, based on a simple social preferences utility function. In this measurement approach, subjects make resource allocation choices with real consequences and the design ensures comparability of different revealed preferences (i.e., people’s willingness to make tradeoffs between themselves and others via donations to NGOs supporting different environmental and social causes). We then use this measurement method in an exploratory fashion to consistently assess preferences for environmental and humanitarian concerns in a laboratory experiment. We find that social and environmental value orientations are robustly interrelated, and further that people are generally more willing to pay to benefit people in need, compared to abstract environmental causes. We conclude that interventions to nudge people towards proenvironmental behavior will have a greater impact if human suffering resulting from global climate change is made more salient.
Highlights
One of the major challenges facing humanity is global climate change
Phenomenons are often vague and tied in with other beliefs (Whitmarsh 2009). We argue that such vague descriptions measure a decision makers (DMs)’s weight for different causes on a level of generality and vagueness that is comparable to the other entity in the traditional measures of Social value orientation (SVO) and social preferences, which is usually described as an anonymous other person
It displays the distributions of SVO, the three environmental value orientation (EVO), and humanitarian value orientation (HVO) on the left side
Summary
One of the major challenges facing humanity is global climate change. In order to address this challenge and mitigate the environmental effects of large-scale industrialization, the actions of multiple decision makers (DMs) must be coordinated. Contributing to promote environmental well-being is a social dilemma (see, for instance, Hardin 1968; Milinski et al 2006; Ostrom 2014), an unfortunate situation where typical market forces do not give rise to efficient outcomes. Many DMs are willing to forgo some of their own material gain in order to increase the well-being of others, a concept referred to as social value orientation Sufficient SVO can act as a solution to social dilemmas and further be useful in mitigating climate change (Gowdy 2008; Fehr-Duda and Fehr 2016)
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