This dissertation uses a multiple-paper format to explore the relationships among environmentally significant behaviors (ESBs) at the individual and household levels, value orientations, and moral intuitions. Forty years of scholarship provides a nuanced understanding of the drivers, processes, and consequences of a range of ESBs; yet, there remain emergent and underexplored behaviors and predictors. In Chapter Two, I report the results of a between-subjects experiment investigating how values, moral intuitions, and varying psychological distances in messages about biodiversity loss influence subjects’ choice of donating to a local, national, or international arm of a biodiversity conservation charity. In Chapter Three, I report on a between-subjects experiment examining how water conservation behavioral intentions and donation to an environmental charity are influenced by psychological distance (i.e., spatial and temporal distance from a drought), values, and morals. Chapter Three also introduces a new water conservation behavior instrument. In these two chapters, I use ordinary least squares, logistic, and zero-inflated negative binomial regression techniques. I directly observe monetary donations as a relatively novel outcome measure reflecting advances in online experimentation methods and capturing an important fundraising mechanism for environmental causes. I also introduce psychological distance as a novel potential predictor of environmentally significant behaviors.Research streams of this decades-long duration can benefit from occasional reviews and systematization to improve their coherence and lead to a more organized accumulation of knowledge. To this end, in Chapter Four, I report an analysis of a sample of the environmentally significant behavior/pro-environmental behavior literature. My review identifies the differences in and consequences of the performance of individual versus scaled outcome measures as well as a variety of psychosocial predictors, and the employment of our most-used theoretical approaches.
Read
