Abstract
Acquiring a better understanding of what drives pro-environmental and sustainable behaviour is important for both researchers and practitioners alike. The purpose of this paper is to explore the moderating role of locus of control and self-construal on the relationship between pro-environmental beliefs and pro-environmental consumer behaviour. We explicitly model the endorsement of the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) as a predictor of three specific types of environmental behaviour—travel, purchasing and day to day activities. The results show a positive and significant association between the endorsement of NEP and a person’s pro-environmental traveling behaviour, purchasing behaviour and day to day activities. Moreover, we find that the effects are moderated by a person’s locus of control, specifically, it remains positive and significant only for people with an internal locus of control. However, we found no moderating effect of a person’s self-construal on the association between NEP and pro-environmental behaviour. The findings are important in the continuing work to understand what is limiting consumers to behave according to their beliefs. Practical and theoretical implications of the results as well as suggestions for future research are presented.
Highlights
For marketers of “green” products and services and for public policy-makers attempting to swing the public’s behaviour in an eco-friendly direction, the gap between one’s attitudes/beliefs/intentions and behaviour has been a several decade long challenge [1,2,3,4,5]
We suggest that locus of control and self-construal moderate the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP)-behaviour relationship, and the succeeding paragraphs present the background for our assumptions in more detail
We suggest that two such traits, locus of control and self-construal, will moderate the effect of NEP on pro-environmental behaviour
Summary
For marketers of “green” products and services and for public policy-makers attempting to swing the public’s behaviour in an eco-friendly direction, the gap between one’s attitudes/beliefs/intentions and behaviour has been a several decade long challenge [1,2,3,4,5]. In psychology, this gap is neither new nor limited to pro-environmental behaviour, but for both marketers and policy-makers who have focused on developing pro-environmental attitudes and beliefs among customers and the general public, a sense of despair develops when a change in these is not accompanied by a corresponding significant behavioural change. We suggest that locus of control and self-construal moderate the NEP-behaviour relationship, and the succeeding paragraphs present the background for our assumptions in more detail
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