A Scientific Discussion of Post-Materialism Values and Environmental Behavior

Ted Peterson () and Kacey Tollefson
Additional contact information
Ted Peterson: Information Technology and Decision Sciences Department, Ryan College of Business, University of North Texas, 1307 W Highland St, Denton, TX 76201, USA
Kacey Tollefson: School of Business, University of Utah, 201 Presidents’ Cir, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA

Businesses, 2024, vol. 4, issue 3, 1-24

Abstract: Inglehart developed a theory examining the changes of values in post-industrial societies from materialist towards post-materialist views. Inglehart contended that the rise of post-materialism helps explain the rise of environmentalism since the 1960s. Through a 2022 survey targeting individual utility customers, we employed Inglehart’s post-materialist index examining the impact of environmental behavior and other attributes. This study considers demographic profiling for material and post-materialist views in light of recent social movements and inflationary pressures. We observed that materialists, predominately Asians and Whites, tend to be older, are homeowners, are either married or widowed, and have lived in their homes the longest. Post-materialists were also found to be young, partnered, politically liberal, and least likely to be Asian. While investigated, environmental behavior was not explained by any of the demographic characteristics. We suggest research assessing any value shifts pertaining to attitudes and behaviors towards environmental behavior. Future research should obtain a more representative minority-group sample.

Keywords: materialism; post-materialism; environmental decision making; renewable energy attitudes; environmentalist viewpoints; environmental concern; environmental values (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A1 D0 D4 D6 D7 D8 D9 E0 E2 E3 E4 E5 E6 E7 F0 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 G0 G1 G2 H0 J0 K2 L0 L1 L2 M0 M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 N0 N1 N2 O0 O1 P0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7116/4/3/22/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7116/4/3/22/ (text/html)

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:gam:jbusin:v:4:y:2024:i:3:p:22-370:d:1455647

Access Statistics for this article

Businesses is currently edited by Dr. Patrick Han

More articles in Businesses from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().