Toward a Coherent Theory of Environmentally Significant Behavior

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Paul C. Stern

Private-Sphere Environmentalism

Consumer researchers and psychologists have focused mainly on behaviors in the private sphere: the purchase, use, and disposal of personal and household products that have environmental impact. It is useful to subdivide these according to the type of decision they involve: the purchase of major household goods and services that are environmentally significant in their impact (e.g., automobiles, energy for the home, recreational travel), the use and maintenance of environmentally important goods (e.g., home heating and cooling systems), household waste disposal, and "green" consumerism (purchasing practices that consider the environmental impact of production processes, for example, purchasing recycled products and organically grown foods). Making such distinctions has revealed that some types of choice, such as infrequent decisions to purchase automobiles and major household appliances, tend to have much greater environmental impact than others, such as changes in the level of use of the same equipment: the distinction between efficiency and curtailment behaviors (Stern & Gardner, 1981a, 1981b). Private-sphere behaviors may also form coherent clusters empirically (e.g., Bratt, 1999a), and different types of private-sphere behavior may have different determinants (e.g., Black, Stern, & Elworth, 1985). Private-sphere behaviors are unlike public-sphere environmentalism in that they have direct environmental consequences. The environmental impact of any individual's personal behavior, however, is small. Such individual behaviors have environmentally significant impact only in the aggregate, when many people independently do the same things.

Other Environmentally Significant Behaviors

Individuals may significantly affect the environment through other behaviors, such as influencing the actions of organizations to which they belong. For example, engineers may design manufactured products in more or less environmentally benign ways, bankers and developers may use or ignore environmental criteria in their decisions, and maintenance workers' actions may reduce or increase the pollution produced by manufacturing plants or commercial buildings. Such behaviors can have great environmental impact because organizational actions are the largest direct sources of many environmental problems (Stern & Gardner, 1981a, 1981b; Stern, 2000). The determinants of individual behavior within organizations are likely to be different from those of political or household behaviors.

Evidence for Distinguishing Major Behavioral Types

Research my colleagues and I have conducted suggests that this distinction among behavioral types is not only conceptually coherent but statistically reliable and psychologically meaningful. For instance, a factor analysis of the behavioral items in the environment module of the 1993 General Social Survey revealed a three-factor solution (Dietz et al., 1998). One factor included four private-sector household behaviors (e.g., buying organic produce, sorting household waste for recycling); a second included two environmental citizenship behaviors (signing a petition and belonging to an environmental group); and the third included three items indicating willingness to make personal financial sacrifices for environmental goals, which assess policy support. A different pattern of social-psychological and socio-demographic predictors was associated with each of the behavioral types, and even the two citizenship behaviors had quite different sets of predictors.