Abstract
If human behavior is to become more sustainable, people will have to be willing to sacrifice personal gains and benefits for the sake of sustainability. Decisions will have to involve making tradeoffs between what is good for the self and what is good for sustainability. In the present paper, we studied the psychology of such tradeoffs in the context of a carbon dioxide (CO2) emission versus travel time tradeoff task. The experiment investigated how intrinsic motivational factors (environmental concern), extrinsic motivational information (a normative message) and extrinsic motivation-neutral information (anchors) influence these tradeoffs. The results revealed that extrinsic factors interact in their effects on tradeoffs such that participants were willing to travel for a longer time for the benefit of less CO2 emissions when they were externally motivated by a normative message, but only when this motivational emphasis was combined with a high anchor. Furthermore, this interaction was particularly strong in participants with high environmental concern. We conclude that extrinsic and intrinsic motivational factors interact in their effect on making people willing to accept personal losses in exchange for sustainability gains and that these motivational factors may have to be combined with further extrinsic information to influence decisions.
Highlights
Climate change is “the defining issue of our time” (United Nations, 2020)
The purpose of the present study was to investigate the psychology of CO2 emission versus travel time tradeoffs and to explore how these tradeoffs are influenced by extrinsic motivational information, extrinsic motivation-free information and intrinsic motivational factors
In the high anchor condition, the addition of informa tion on recommended maximum weekly CO2 emission resulted in higher answers, i.e., people were willing to travel for a longer time
Summary
Climate change is “the defining issue of our time” (United Nations, 2020). The International panel on climate change (IPCC) has estimated that a 1.5 ◦C increase in global temperature will cause a range of severe effects, such as a rise in sea levels and increased frequencies and/or intensities of droughts as well as heavy precipitation (IPCC, 2018). The reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions is a vital step to fight global warming. The success of these reductions will partly depend on changes in human behavior patterns (Steg & Vlek, 2009). If human behavior is to become more sustainable, people will have to be willing to sacrifice personal gains and benefits for the sake of sustainability. We studied the psychology of such tradeoffs in the context of a CO2 emission versus travel time tradeoff task
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