Global Evidence on the Motives for Sustainable Behaviors

Resumen

Behavioral change is an integral part of climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, many interventions that encourage individuals to make more sustainable choices do not lead to the desired behavioral change. To tackle this challenge, we take a step back and focus on understanding the complex motivational structure behind sustainable behaviors. We (i) identify individually relevant motives for sustainable behaviors, (ii) show that these motives can be predicted from demographic variables and individuals’ economic preferences, and (iii) discuss how these insights can be used for designing more efficient behavioral interventions. We base our analysis on rich multinational survey data collected from 1,954 respondents across the United States, China, and the Netherlands. Our approach is based on a novel large language model. We identify 14 motives in 14,262 individual responses to open-ended questions that elicit reasons for seven sustainable behaviors. For example, the motive Health Comfort is the most relevant and most general motive for the behaviors we studied, ranging from showering time to frequency of flying. Individually relevant motives are associated with demographic variables such as gender and age, but also economic preferences. For respondents with a lower discount rate, for example, the motive Electricity Energy is very important, whereas Want Feel is less relevant. Our analysis also reveals striking similarities regarding the relevance and behavioral specificity of motives across the cultures. When comparing the relevant motives across behaviors, we uncover that behaviors with more overlapping motives are also more positively correlated. This finding offers an explanation of spillover effects caused by implicitly or explicitly appealing to behavioral motives that are relevant for multiple behaviors. By investigating the motives for multiple behaviors and cultures simultaneously, we are able to generate generalizable and novel insights of cross-cultural importance. These results offer promising pathways towards designing more efficient, targeted interventions focusing on individual motives.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Wei, S. (., Krefeld-Schwalb, A., & Gabel, S. (2024). Global Evidence on the Motives for Sustainable Behaviors. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/syku6