Experimental evidence of an environmental attitude-behavior gap in high-cost situations

Mike Farjam, Olexandr Nikolaychuk () and Giangiacomo Bravo

Ecological Economics, 2019, vol. 166, issue C, -

Abstract: So far, there has been mixed evidence in the literature regarding the relationship between environmental attitudes and actual ‘green’ actions, something known as the attitude-behavior gap. This raises the question of when attitudes can actually work as a lever to promote environmental objectives, such as climate change mitigation, and, conversely, when other factors would be more effective. This paper presents an online experiment with real money at stake and real-world consequences designed to test the effect of environmental attitudes on behavior under various conditions. We found that environmental attitudes affected behavior only in low-cost situations. This finding is consistent with the low-cost hypothesis of environmental behavior postulating that concerned individuals will undertake low-cost actions in order to reduce the cognitive dissonance between their attitudes and rational realization of the environmental impact of their behavior but avoid higher-cost actions despite their greater potential as far as environmental protection. This finding has important consequences for the design of more effective climate policies as it puts limits on what can be achieved by raising environmental concern alone.

Keywords: Climate change mitigation; Low-cost hypothesis; Online experiment; Collective-risk social dilemma (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919303969
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Experimental evidence of an environmental attitude-behavior gap in high-cost situations (2019)
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:eee:ecolec:v:166:y:2019:i:c:2

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106434

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().