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Climate policy support as a tool to control others’ (but not own) environmental behavior? [1]

['Charlotte A. Kukowski', 'Department Of Psychology', 'University Of Zurich', 'Zurich', 'Katharina Bernecker', 'Leoni Von Der Heyde', 'Georg-August-University Of Göttingen', 'Göttingen', 'Margarete Boos', 'Veronika Brandstätter']

Date: 2022-07

Drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are necessary to successfully mitigate climate change. Individual environmental behavior is central to this change. Given that environmental behavior necessitates 1) effortful individual self-control and 2) cooperation by others, public policy may constitute an attractive instrument for regulating one’s own as well as others’ environmental behavior. Framing climate change mitigation as a cooperative self-control problem, we explore the incremental predictive power of self-control and beliefs surrounding others’ cooperation beyond established predictors of policy support in study 1 using machine-learning (N = 610). In study 2, we systematically test and confirm the effects of self-control and beliefs surrounding others’ cooperation (N = 270). Both studies showed that personal importance of climate change mitigation and perceived insufficiency of others’ environmental behavior predict policy support, while there was no strong evidence for a negative association between own-self control success and policy support. These results emerge beyond the effects of established predictors, such as environmental attitudes and beliefs, risk perception (study 1), and social norms (study 2). Results are discussed in terms of leveraging policy as a behavioral enactment constraint to control others’ but not own environmental behavior.

1. Introduction

The climate crisis is imminent. Wildfires, tornadoes, heatwaves, droughts, flooding, and other extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common, resulting in an unprecedented threat to entire regions and the people who inhabit them [1]. Several of the world’s large land and ocean ecosystems, such as the Amazon rainforest and the West Antarctic ice shield, are approaching tipping points of irreversible damage. A cascade of such tipping events would make large parts of the planet uninhabitable [2].

On the road to a more sustainable future, substantial shifts in many areas of life will become necessary, ranging from the food we eat to the energy that powers our homes, from the modes of travel we choose to our consumption patterns. As pointed out by Nielsen [3], the individual citizen is at the heart of this change: Accumulated everyday actions snowball, adding up to a considerable impact of individual-level behaviors on environmental outcomes [4]. As with other collective-action problems like COVID-19 mitigation, where individuals must incur short-term personal costs for long-term collective pay-off [5] alongside potential benefits, engaging in pro-environmental behaviors requires individuals to exert self-control to advance a societal goal. In other words, individuals must overcome conflicting desires and impulses (e.g., for comfort) for the sake of collective goal attainment. However, self-control is effortful, and individuals often do not succeed in implementing pro-environmental behavior despite holding pro-environmental goals [i.e., self-control failure, 3, 6, 7].

Given the difficulty in self-regulating individual environmental behavior, behavioral policy constitutes a promising pathway toward urgently needed large-scale change [8, 9]. By incentivizing or mandating environmentally helpful behaviors and making environmentally harmful behaviors difficult or impossible to enact, behavioral policy steers individual behavior toward the societal climate change mitigation goal. For instance, behavioral policy can increase prices on environmentally harmful behaviors such as air travel and meat consumption, or make them more difficult, e.g., by banning cars from city centers. In doing so, behavioral policy externally regulates environmentally relevant behavior, thereby freeing individuals from self-control conflicts to which they might otherwise succumb [10] and markedly increasing the likelihood of pro-environmental behavior implementation. This necessity of supplementing self-regulated behavior with external intervention to steer individual action is characteristic of large-scale collective-action problems [5]. For instance, in the COVID-19 context, collective goal pursuit, that is, pandemic mitigation, similarly requires individual self-controlled behavior in combination with behavioral policy to steer individual efforts (see [11]).

Given the usefulness of behavioral policy in combating climate change through large-scale alignment of individual behavior with the societal mitigation goal, it is important to understand the factors that shape public support for such policy (e.g., [12, 13]). That is, under which circumstances do individuals support (vs. oppose) government regulation of individual environmentally relevant behavior? Our interest in predicting policy support is threefold. First, support for behavioral policy is theoretically interesting in that individuals agree to external regulation of their own and others’ behavior that would otherwise be self-regulated. Second, we assume that policy regarding individual pro-environmental behavior facilitates the successful implementation of such behavior. Conversely, low policy support may lead to insufficient compliance, rendering policy less effective. Third, the successful implementation of behavioral climate policy requires the support of the public. Indeed, the historical record shows [14] that low public support for government measures can lead to social division, protesting, and political unrest [15]. Especially in democracies with direct participation elements (e.g., referendums), support is needed for citizens to vote for or sign petitions aiming to implement climate policy. In turn, democratically backed policies can have positive downstream effects on compliance and acceptance of further political instruments, as recently observed in declining numbers of protests following the majority acceptance of the Swiss COVID referendum, possibly due to perceptions of dominant public opinion via one’s social environment, as proposed in spiral of silence theory [16].

1.1. Climate change mitigation as a cooperative self-control problem From a social psychological perspective, climate change mitigation constitutes a cooperative problem [8, 17] that requires individual self-control (see [3] for a review). Individuals must exert self-regulatory effort [10, 18], incurring personal costs (e.g., sacrificing comfort) for collective payoff [19], for a review, see [15]. Such self-control effort and success become more likely when the personal goal is valued, that is, of importance to the individual (value choice theory, [20]). Notably, pro-environmental self-control is embedded into a societal context and only becomes effective when compounded: Contrary to an individual-level goal, such as health or academic achievement (e.g., [21]), self-control in pro-environmental behavior primarily serves the collective benefit, individual benefits only materializing if collective behavior is sufficient to bring about the desired outcome. Therefore, in contrast with other self-control problems, others’ behavior is relevant to the attainment of the collective goal state (i.e., mitigating climate change). Our conceptualization of pro-environmental behavior as a cooperative self-control problem is consistent with a growing body of literature indicating that cooperative behavior requires individual-level self-control [22]. Previous work has shown that the same factors underlying self-control in long-term personal goals enhance behavior for collective over individual interests [23] and that those people higher in trait-self-control are more likely to cooperate in public goods games [24, 25]. While standard definitions of self-control highlight its role in fostering societally beneficial behavior in addition to its relevance to individual goal-striving [26], the literature has focused on self-control deployed in the service of individual-level goals. Thus, despite its definition as a capacity that helps people to align their interest with that of others, self-control research has largely ignored the broader societal context into which it is embedded (for an exception, see [27]). The present work aims to close this gap in the literature by exploring in a first study and then confirming in a second hypothesis-testing study whether individual self-control predicts support for climate mitigation policy. Based on integrative self-control theory [10], we include trait self-control, that is, domain-independent habitual self-control capacity, personal goal importance, that is, the extent to which climate change mitigation is a valued personal goal, and self-control struggle, that is, the extent to which individuals have difficulty enacting pro-environmental behavior given opposing impulses and temptations.

1.2. Policy support as tool to affect other people’s behavior Extant work examining climate policy support has highlighted either descriptive norms (i.e., what others are doing) or injunctive norms (i.e., other’ expectations) regarding environmentally relevant behavior [8, 28–31]. However, it remains unclear how perceptions of the sufficiency and importance of others’ environmental behavior, that is, whether others are perceived to be doing enough to address climate change, associates with support for policy. Classic research on collective action problems suggests that individuals will contribute to a common resources if others do as well, a phenomenon known as contingent consent [32, 33]. Individuals are therefore motivated to align others’ behavior with the collective goal and to punish those who do not cooperate, even at a cost to themselves [34], across cultures [35]. It has additionally been found that groups will vote to restrict individual solutions to collective action problems in favor of collective solutions to bring about cooperation [36]. Such external regulation of individual behavior may be an attractive means of aligning individual collectively relevant behavior, and it has indeed been shown that individuals may see climate policy as a means of externally regulating and restraining environmental behavior for large-scale behavior change in qualitative studies [37, 38]. Recent work on COVID-19 policy substantiates this point, showing that perceiving others as insufficiently compliant with health-protective behaviors is associated with increased support for policy, presumably to regulate such behavior [11]. This aligns with classic work showing that individuals perceive others as more malleable by social influence than themselves [39]. To test the idea that perceptions of the sufficiency and importance of others’ cooperation in mitigating climate change may be associated with support for policy that regulates mitigation behavior, we include two indicators. Specifically, we measure perceived insufficiency in others’ environmental behavior, i.e., the perception that others are not doing enough to protect the climate, and concern with cooperation, i.e., a preoccupation with others’ contributions to climate mitigation.

1.3. Previously established predictors of policy support A substantial body of work has connected a range of environmental attitudes to support for behavioral climate policy. Here, we include two such attitudes as control variables, environmental concern and perceived behavioral control, as these have been identified as relatively proximal predictors of pro-environmental behavior and policy support [40]. Environmental concern refers to an evaluation of the seriousness of environmental problems [41] rooted in individuals’ value systems (Schultz, 2000, 2001, as cited in [42]) and has been identified as the most immediate antecedent of attitudes towards environmentally relevant policy objects, such as green energy [40]. Further, a range of pro-environmental behaviors has been linked to perceived behavioral control (also: perceived consumer effectiveness), which describes an individual’s belief that they can make a meaningful contribution to environmental conservation [43]. Conversely, low perceived behavioral control over a given behavior reduces behavioral intentions, even when attitudes and norms toward the behavior are positive [44]. Indeed, early research has shown that those who are highly concerned about the environment but who perceive a low individual ability to make a difference in environmental conservation are more supportive of government regulation to "force people to protect the environment" [43]. We, therefore, include environmental concern and perceived behavioral control as control variables in study 1. A host of studies has identified a relatively strong link between the perceived risk of climate change and support for action to address it. Prominent theorizing distinguishes between analytic risk perception, which is informed by probabilistic and logical judgment, and affective risk perception, which is guided by affectively informed images and associations [45]. Both types of risk perception have been linked to policy support. For instance, appraisal of negative climate change consequences for oneself and others predicts greater policy support [46–48], as do discrete risk-related emotions, particularly worry [49]. Building on their emergence among the top five most important predictors of climate policy support in Goldberg and colleague’s 2020 article [50], we include both affective (climate change-related anxiety and distress) and analytic perceptions of risk (perceived risk) as control variables in study 1. We additionally control for three sociodemographic variables, political orientation, gender, and age.

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[1] Url: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0269030

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