The moderating role of moral norms and personal cost in compliance with pro-environmental social norms

Abstract

The adoption of sustainable lifestyles plays a key role in mitigating climate change. Previous research has found that social norms—beliefs about what most people do and approve of—profoundly impact individual engagement in pro-environmental behaviour. However, little is known about personal and contextual factors that moderate social norm interventions' effectiveness in motivating pro-environmental engagement. The present work conducted two quasi-experimental studies (N = 1501 and N = 237) on a sample of American adults to address this gap. The studies investigated how individual moral norms and personal costs associated with "acting green" influence the effectiveness of descriptive norm messages that ask individuals to make a pro-environmental pledge. We found that the strength of moral norms did not moderate the effect of social norms on making a pro-environmental pledge. Rather, our findings suggest that the mere activation of one's moral norms—regardless of how strong they are—can eliminate the effect of social descriptive cues on making a pro-environmental pledge. Finally, we found no evidence that social descriptive norm interventions better promote pro-environmental pledges that require relatively little time and effort for participants to formulate (i.e. low-cost pledges) than commitments that require more cognitive time and effort (i.e. high-cost pledges). Although we note that these findings are preliminary, they offer new insights on the interplay between social and moral norms and help set an agenda for future research on potential moderators of social norm interventions.