What motivates green choices – risk or morality?
Exploring conditions that may have an impact on how people evaluate environmentally friendly behavioral alternatives such as buying a contract for renewable energy.
Hovedinnhold
About the project: Our previous research has shown that when people think about environmental issues, they can focus on one of two perspectives. One perspective is that people think about future consequences, for example what the risks of an enviornmental problem are, whether they are personally affected, and whether they can do anything about the problem. The other perspective is to think about moral considerations, for example whether we have an obligation to protect the planet for future generations. In this project, we want to find out whether thinking about consequences or thinking about morality is more likely to motivate pro-environmental behavior. Many environmental problems are collective and people feel that as individuals they cannot contribute much to solving these problems. We therefore assume that a moral perspective often fosters pro-environmental behaviors more than a perspective on the consequences. We plan to conduct an experiment to test whether people who adopt a moral perspective are more likely to choose environmentally friendly behavioral options, for example buying a contract for renewable energy, than people who think about consequences.
Project leader: Professor Gisela Böhm, Department of Psychosocial Science
The results of this research will help to get a better understanding of what determines people’s pro-environmental choices. Energy-related behaviors will be analyzed in the context of other types of behavior. Our findings will be valuable for all fields of application that involve the communication of environmental problems and the promotion of pro-environmental behaviors
Funding: The project is funded through the research collaboration agreement between BKK and UiB.
Collaborators: Institute of Experimental Industrial Psychology, Leuphana University, Lüneburg, (Germany) and Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington (USA)
Project period: Approximately mid 2013- mid 2014
This project is an activity under the Research Group Bergen Laboratory for the Study of Decision, Intuition, Consciousness and Emotion (DICE)
