Profiling the “Pro‐Environmental Individual”: A Personality Perspective
- 17 January 2011
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Wiley in Journal of Personality
- Vol. 80 (1), 81-111
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2011.00721.x
Abstract
There is considerable scientific interest in the psychological correlates of pro‐environmental behaviors. Much research has focused on demographic and social‐psychological characteristics of individuals who consistently perform such actions. Here, we report the results of 2 studies in which we explored relations between broad personality traits and pro‐environmental actions. Using a wide variety of behavior and personality measures, we consistently found moderate positive relations between Openness to Experience and pro‐environmental activities in both a community sample (Study 1: N = 778) and an undergraduate student sample (Study 2: N = 115). In Study 2, we showed that the effect of Openness on pro‐environmental behaviors was fully mediated by individuals’ environmental attitudes and connection to nature. Our findings suggest that high levels of aesthetic appreciation, creativity, and inquisitiveness, but not personality traits associated with altruism, may have motivated the performance of pro‐environmental actions among our respondents. Implications for intervention development are discussed.Keywords
This publication has 45 references indexed in Scilit:
- Personality and environmental concernJournal of Environmental Psychology, 2010
- Egoistic, altruistic, and biospheric environmental concerns: A path analytic investigation of their determinantsScandinavian Journal of Psychology, 2010
- System Justification, the Denial of Global Warming, and the Possibility of “System-Sanctioned Change”Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2009
- Ten facet scales for the Big Five Inventory: Convergence with NEO PI-R facets, self-peer agreement, and discriminant validityJournal of Research in Personality, 2009
- Personality predictors of Consumerism and Environmentalism: A preliminary studyPersonality and Individual Differences, 2007
- Invoking Social NormsCornell Hospitality Quarterly, 2007
- Environmental knowledge and conservation behavior: exploring prevalence and structure in a representative samplePersonality and Individual Differences, 2004
- A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domainsJournal of Research in Personality, 2003
- Values, Beliefs, and Proenvironmental Action: Attitude Formation Toward Emergent Attitude Objects1Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1995
- Analysis and Synthesis of Research on Responsible Environmental Behavior: A Meta-AnalysisThe Journal of Environmental Education, 1987