Systematic Review of Environmental Activism

Abstract

Abstract: Despite a need for societal change to resolve environmental problems, social psychology has largely focused research on individual changes. At the same time, new climate movements recently emerged and social psychology has theoretical tools to study their societal impacts. In this review, we study how social psychology has approached environmental activism. We performed a search in the literature on different databases and 56 articles were finally included and analyzed with theoretical tools: levels of explanation ( Doise, 1982 ) and social influence models ( Moscovici, 1976b ). Results indicate that articles concerning environmental activism mainly focus their research on understanding the predictors of individual involvement in activism. On the other hand, few articles have dealt with the societal impacts of environmental activism. We discuss these results by questioning the paradigm and dominant approaches that lead to this individualization of environmental activism, and we propose other approaches to study environmental change.