Expanding and Evaluating Motives for Environmentally Responsible Behavior - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Raymond De Young

Raymond De Young [*]

This article contends that while striving to promote environmentally responsible behavior, we have focused attention too narrowly on just two classes of motives. There is a need to expand the range of motives available to practitioners and to provide a framework within which motives can be evaluated for both their immediate and long-term effectiveness. The article then examines a strategy for promoting environmentally responsible behavior that has significant potential. This strategy is based on a particular form of motivation called intrinsic satisfaction. Nine studies are reviewed that have outlined the structure of intrinsic satisfaction. A key theme discussed is the human inclination for competence. This fundamental human concern is shown to have both a general form and a resource-specific version.

Although the search for motives effective at promoting environmentally responsible behavior (ERB) is being enthusiastically pursued, the work so far has been somewhat confined. The vast majority of attention has been given to only two motivations: providing material incentives and disincentives sufficient to make the behavior worth attending to and focusing on the altruistic reasons for engaging in the behavior. There has been relatively little exploration of other, potentially more useful alternatives.

Early attention was given to the use of incentives and disincentives. Scott Geller and his colleagues explored the effectiveness of incentives and disincentives in promoting ERB and established that such behavior can be motivated by the manipulation of material reward, whether token or real (Geller, 1987, 1992; Geller, Winett, & Everett, 1982; see also Cone & Hayes, 1980). The last quarter-century has witnessed a continued interest in and expansion of the behaviorist perspective (see, for instance, Geller, 1989). As this article will discuss, however, it was two undesirable properties of this approach that encouraged researchers to pursue other motivations. It turned out that incentives needed constant reintroduction to remain effective and they proved to be less reliable than we had hoped (Katzev & Johnson, 1987).

Altruism is another motive that has received significant research attention. It remains popular among researchers as a powerful, if not the dominant, motive for the adoption of ERB. The major conceptual framework for studying altruism has been the Schwartz moral norm activation model (Schwartz, 1970), although Geller has recently proposed an alternative framework (Allen & Ferrand, 1999; Geller, 1995a, 1995b). Current empirical work identifies both a sociocentric and an ecocentric form of altruism (see Eckersley, 1992; Schultz, this issue). For the concept of altruism to be useful for practitioners, we will need to provide the type of specific guidelines for using altruism that exist for using incentives and disincentives. Unfortunately, altruism may suffer from more than just a lack of procedural guidelines, for as Kaplan (this issue) suggests, altruism may be a fatal remedy (Sieber, 1981).

Environmentally Responsible Behavior as Multiply Determined

There is no scientific reason to narrow the range to just these two categories of motivation. After over a century of psychological research, it would hardly seem necessary to argue in support of the concept of the multiple determination of behavior, but for a variety of reasons single-determination theories remain popular. From an evolutionary perspective, it seems likely that there would be multiple motivations impinging on any given behavior. As philosopher Mary Midgley (1978) has pointed out, human beings want many things, not just one. Furthermore, the many are not reducible to or exchangeable for one. We want clear air, she notes, and clean water. No amount of the one can substitute for a lack of the other. She is troubled by a tendency to seek one central motivation for all that we do, finding such efforts "a misplaced and futile sort of economy."

Empirical evidence has emerged supporting the idea that ERB has multiple antecedents (Schultz, this issue; Stern & Dietz, 1994; Stern, Dietz, Kalof, & Guagnano, 1995; Thompson & Barton, 1994) and that specific behaviors may have distinctly different patterns of initiation (Cook & Berrenberg, 1981; Oskamp et al., 1991). Thus, it seems extremely unlikely that ERB is wholly a function of a single motive and more likely, as Allen and Ferrand (1999) contend, that ERB is multiply determined. Evaluation Criteria for Behavior Change Techniques

To select from among alternative motives we must determine the conditions under which they are effective. Traditionally the effectiveness of a motive is assessed by predicting the occurrence or frequency of self-reported or observed behavior (see, for instance, Corral-Verdugo, 1997). Alternatively, a motive is shown to be significantly associated with an established measure of environmental attitudes or concern (e.g., the New Environmental Paradigm) in an effort to validate its effectiveness. Such unidimensional evaluation, however, misses the fact that there are many features a motive might possess. These features can be organized into two general categories. Outcome-based evaluations deal with the effectiveness of a technique in isolation, whereas context-based evaluations focus on those factors that moderate the effectiveness of a technique.