Extreme Weather Events: Perception, Pro-Environmental Behavior, and the Tools to Measure Them

Christopher Donovan and Trisha Shrum

No 9zadu, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Understanding the motivations and barriers to pro-environmental behavior is essential in mitigating climate change. Extreme weather events may act as focusing events that disrupt routines and encourage pro-environmental behavior, but the inability to reliably measure behavior makes it challenging to study. We used two representative surveys of US residents to administer the REBL Scale, a unidimensional and invariant measure of short-term, pro-environmental behavior. We used factor analytic models to investigate whether experience with extreme weather events influenced REBL scores, either directly or indirectly, as well as whether the effect was mediated or moderated by psychological distance to climate change and attribution of weather events to climate change, respectively. Experience with extreme weather events had both significant direct and indirect effects on REBL scores. Respondents who reported being affected by extreme weather were more likely to have performed pro-environmental behaviors in the last week. Psychological distance was a significant mediator of the indirect effect, which was stronger than the direct effect. The moderating effect of attribution of events to climate change was ambiguous; two methods of latent moderation produced conflicting results. The results suggest that experiences with extreme weather may influence behavior even while controlling for political preferences. Psychological distance could be an important factor in designing behavioral interventions. The moderating effect of attribution deserves further research, as do the latent moderation methods we use to study interactions.

Date: 2025-01-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/677ad9073fb894bcbfe6d884/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:9zadu

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/9zadu

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().