IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v15y2023i9p7156-d1132279.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Simple and Smart: Investigating Two Heuristics That Guide the Intention to Engage in Different Climate-Change-Mitigation Behaviors

Author

Listed:
  • Ellen Matthies

    (Department of Psychology, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Postfach 4120, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany)

  • Theresa de Paula Sieverding

    (Department of Psychology, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Postfach 4120, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany)

  • Lukas Engel

    (Department of Psychology, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Postfach 4120, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany)

  • Anke Blöbaum

    (Department of Psychology, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Postfach 4120, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany)

Abstract

Individuals can support climate-change mitigation in many ways, e.g., through private-sphere behaviors or the support of political measures. We assume that the common climate-change-mitigation heuristic of restriction does not sufficiently support impactful mitigation intentions and therefore introduce and investigate a new heuristic (optimization heuristic.) In a cross-sectional survey with N = 1427 participants (representative of the German population with regard to age, gender, education), we developed two scales to measure the heuristics of restriction and optimization. As individual climate-change-mitigation intentions, we recorded four types of private-sphere behavior, activism, and three forms of policy support. Further psychological variables (personal norm, biospheric value orientation) and sociodemographic variables were recorded. The factorial structure of all concepts was assessed by means of confirmatory factor analyses. Hierarchical regression analyses with the climate-change-mitigation intentions as the criterion were carried out. Results support the assumption of two related, yet distinct, climate-change-mitigation heuristics that were highly correlated with biospheric value orientation. We additionally computed measure of the dominance of the restriction heuristic. This variable had no correlation with biospheric values, and correlated with the intentions in the expected ways, indicating that individuals with a dominant restriction heuristic tend to show lower scores of impactful climate-change-mitigation intentions.

Suggested Citation

  • Ellen Matthies & Theresa de Paula Sieverding & Lukas Engel & Anke Blöbaum, 2023. "Simple and Smart: Investigating Two Heuristics That Guide the Intention to Engage in Different Climate-Change-Mitigation Behaviors," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(9), pages 1-27, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:9:p:7156-:d:1132279
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/9/7156/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/9/7156/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Helmut Rainer & Clara Albrecht & Stefan Bauernschuster & Anita Fichtl & Timo Hener & Joachim Ragnitz & Anita Dietrich, 2018. "Deutschland 2017 - Studie zu den Einstellungen und Verhaltensweisen der Bürgerinnen und Bürger im vereinigten Deutschland," ifo Forschungsberichte, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, number 96.
    2. Peng Liu & Run Yang & Zhigang Xu, 2019. "Public Acceptance of Fully Automated Driving: Effects of Social Trust and Risk/Benefit Perceptions," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 39(2), pages 326-341, February.
    3. Birgül Çakır Yıldırım & Güliz Karaarslan Semiz, 2019. "Future Teachers’ Sustainable Water Consumption Behavior: A Test of the Value-Belief-Norm Theory," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(6), pages 1-18, March.
    4. Nika Hein, 2022. "Factors Influencing the Purchase Intention for Recycled Products: Integrating Perceived Risk into Value-Belief-Norm Theory," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(7), pages 1-15, March.
    5. Daniel Moran & Richard Wood & Edgar Hertwich & Kim Mattson & Joao F. D. Rodriguez & Karin Schanes & John Barrett, 2020. "Quantifying the potential for consumer-oriented policy to reduce European and foreign carbon emissions," Climate Policy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(S1), pages 28-38, April.
    6. Leibao Zhang & Liming Sheng & Wenyu Zhang & Shuai Zhang, 2020. "Do Personal Norms Predict Citizens’ Acceptance of Green Transport Policies in China," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(12), pages 1-16, June.
    7. Kristian S. Nielsen & Kimberly A. Nicholas & Felix Creutzig & Thomas Dietz & Paul C. Stern, 2021. "The role of high-socioeconomic-status people in locking in or rapidly reducing energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions," Nature Energy, Nature, vol. 6(11), pages 1011-1016, November.
    8. Suhaib A. Bandh & Fayaz A. Malla & Irteza Qayoom & Haika Mohi-Ud-Din & Aqsa Khursheed Butt & Aashia Altaf & Shahid A. Wani & Richard Betts & Thanh Hai Truong & Nguyen Dang Khoa Pham & Dao Nam Cao & Sh, 2023. "Importance of Blue Carbon in Mitigating Climate Change and Plastic/Microplastic Pollution and Promoting Circular Economy," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(3), pages 1-29, February.
    9. Steenkamp, Jan-Benedict E M & Baumgartner, Hans, 1998. "Assessing Measurement Invariance in Cross-National Consumer Research," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 25(1), pages 78-90, June.
    10. Ertz, Myriam & Karakas, Fahri & Sarigöllü, Emine, 2016. "Exploring pro-environmental behaviors of consumers: An analysis of contextual factors, attitude, and behaviors," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 69(10), pages 3971-3980.
    11. Rosseel, Yves, 2012. "lavaan: An R Package for Structural Equation Modeling," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 48(i02).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bloebaum, Anke & Schmidt, Karolin & Böcher, Michael & Arlinghaus, Julia & Krause, Friederike & Matthies, Ellen, 2024. "Overcoming heuristics that hinder people’s acceptance of climate-change-mitigation technologies," OSF Preprints dqt4u, Center for Open Science.
    2. Theresa de Paula Sieverding & Vanessa Kulcar & Karolin Schmidt, 2024. "Act like There Is a Tomorrow—Contact and Affinity with Younger People and Legacy Motivation as Predictors of Climate Protection among Older People," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(4), pages 1-26, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Carlos Miguel Lemos & Ross Joseph Gore & Ivan Puga-Gonzalez & F LeRon Shults, 2019. "Dimensionality and factorial invariance of religiosity among Christians and the religiously unaffiliated: A cross-cultural analysis based on the International Social Survey Programme," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(5), pages 1-36, May.
    2. Daniel L. Oberski, 2016. "A Review of Latent Variable Modeling With R," Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, , vol. 41(2), pages 226-233, April.
    3. Lars Meyer-Waarden & Julien Cloarec, 2022. "“Baby, you can drive my car”: Psychological antecedents that drive consumers’ adoption of AI-powered autonomous vehicles," Post-Print hal-03385891, HAL.
    4. Xue Wang & Suwei Feng & Tianyi Tang, 2023. "Acceptability toward Policy Mix: Impact of Low-Carbon Travel Intention, Fairness, and Effectiveness," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(20), pages 1-22, October.
    5. Braun, Erik & Zenker, Sebastian, 2022. "In governments we trust: A two-country Brexit field experiment on perceived uncertainty as mediator for consumer decisions," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 335-346.
    6. Yang, Xisi & Thøgersen, John, 2022. "When people are green and greedy: A new perspective of recycling rewards and crowding-out in Germany, the USA and China," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 144(C), pages 217-235.
    7. Claudia Marino & C. M. Hirst & C. Murray & A. Vieno & Marcantonio M. Spada, 2018. "Positive Mental Health as a Predictor of Problematic Internet and Facebook Use in Adolescents and Young Adults," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 19(7), pages 2009-2022, October.
    8. André Pirralha & Wiebke Weber, 2020. "Correction for measurement error in invariance testing: An illustration using SQP," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(10), pages 1-18, October.
    9. Yaël Drunen & Bram Spruyt & Filip Droogenbroeck, 2021. "The Salience of Perceived Societal Conflict in Europe: A 27 Country Study on the Development of a Measure for Generalized Conflict Thinking," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 158(2), pages 595-635, December.
    10. Holendro Singh Chungkham & Michael Ingre & Robert Karasek & Hugo Westerlund & Töres Theorell, 2013. "Factor Structure and Longitudinal Measurement Invariance of the Demand Control Support Model: An Evidence from the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH)," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(8), pages 1-11, August.
    11. Ingmar Leijen & Hester van Herk, 2021. "Health and Culture: The Association between Healthcare Preferences for Non-Acute Conditions, Human Values and Social Norms," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(23), pages 1-15, December.
    12. Büchi, Moritz, 2016. "Measurement invariance in comparative Internet use research," MediArXiv 42h39, Center for Open Science.
    13. Patel, Jayesh D. & Trivedi, Rohit H. & Yagnik, Arpan, 2020. "Self-identity and internal environmental locus of control: Comparing their influences on green purchase intentions in high-context versus low-context cultures," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 53(C).
    14. Ishant Sharma & Sabyasachee Mishra, 2023. "Ranking preferences towards adopting autonomous vehicles based on peer inputs and advertisements," Transportation, Springer, vol. 50(6), pages 2139-2192, December.
    15. Shen, Famei & Li, Jie & Chen, Jianghang & Wang, Wangshuai, 2023. "Exploring young consumers’ intention to pay for shared express packaging: A multi-study analysis," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 167(C).
    16. Dallin George Young & Wen Zeng & Jane Skalicky & Jacques van der Meer, 2024. "The Quality and Quantity of Participation in Peer Leader Experiences and Student Outcomes: A Cross-National Validation of Constructs and Predictive Model," Research in Higher Education, Springer;Association for Institutional Research, vol. 65(5), pages 893-913, August.
    17. Alzubaidi, Hawazin & Slade, Emma L. & Dwivedi, Yogesh K., 2021. "Examining antecedents of consumers’ pro-environmental behaviours: TPB extended with materialism and innovativeness," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 122(C), pages 685-699.
    18. Lasarov, Wassili & Mai, Robert & García de Frutos, Nieves & Egea, José Manuel Ortega & Hoffmann, Stefan, 2019. "Counter-arguing as barriers to environmentally motivated consumption reduction: A multi-country study," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 281-305.
    19. Meyer-Waarden, Lars & Cloarec, Julien, 2022. "“Baby, you can drive my car”: Psychological antecedents that drive consumers’ adoption of AI-powered autonomous vehicles," Technovation, Elsevier, vol. 109(C).
    20. Sonia Nawrocka & Hans De Witte & Margherita Pasini & Margherita Brondino, 2023. "A Person-Centered Approach to Job Insecurity: Is There a Reciprocal Relationship between the Quantitative and Qualitative Dimensions of Job Insecurity?," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(7), pages 1-27, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:9:p:7156-:d:1132279. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.