Interindividual differences in environmentally relevant positive trait affect impacts sustainable behavior in everyday life

Abstract

Emotions are powerful drivers of human behavior that may make people aware of the urgency to act to mitigate climate change and provide a motivational basis to engage in sustainable action. However, attempts to leverage emotions via climate communications have yielded unsatisfactory results, with many interventions failing to produce the desired behaviors. It is important to understand the underlying affective mechanisms when designing communications, rather than treating emotions as simple behavioral levers that directly impact behavior. Across two field experiments, we show that individual predispositions to experience positive emotions in an environmental context (trait affect) predict pro-environmental actions and corresponding shifts in affective states (towards personal as well as witnessed pro-environmental actions). Moreover, trait affect predicts the individual behavioral impact of positively valenced emotion-based intervention strategies from environmental messages. These findings have important implications for the targeted design of affect-based interventions aiming to promote sustainable behavior and may be of interest within other domains that utilize similar intervention strategies (e.g., within the health domain).

Figure 1

The impact of trait affect on environmental behavior and experienced affect in real life in Experiment 1. (A) Line graph illustrating the positive relationship between trait affect and likelihood to commit positive ERBs. (B) Interaction between trait affect and committed positive ERBs compared to NonERBs. (C) Interaction between trait affect and exposed to positive ERBs compared to NonERBs. Vertical dotted lines illustrate where slopes significantly differ from each other as determined by simple slopes analyses. All graphs show predicted values, the grand mean centered values of trait affect (positive outcome ETA) and 95% confidence intervals as estimated from their respective regression models. ERB = environmentally relevant behavior; NonERBs = behaviors reported that were not environmentally relevant.

Figure 2

Trait affect, affective environmental news messages, and pro-environmental behaviors in Experiment 2. (A) Interaction between trait affect and positive versus non-environmental news messages on committed positive ERBs. Vertical dotted lines illustrate where slopes significantly differ from each other as determined by simple slopes analyses (it should be noted that the lower cutoff at − 3.11 represents the bottom 2.2% of all participants). (B) Interaction between trait affect and positive versus negative environmental news messages on committed positive ERBs. Vertical dotted lines again illustrate where slopes significantly differ from each other as determined by simple slopes analyses (it should be noted that the lower cutoff at − 0.72 represents the bottom 18.8% of all participants). All graphs show predicted values, grand mean centered values of trait affect, and 95% confidence intervals as estimated from their respective regression models. ERB = environmentally related behavior.