Global Social Norms and Environmental Behavior

Abstract

We adopt a recently introduced incentivized method to elicit widely shared beliefs concerning (a) social norms, (b) environmental effect, and (c) difficulty of a wide range of environmental behaviors. We establish that these characteristics, as reflected in elicited beliefs recorded in one sample, predict (out-of-sample) environmental behaviors in a second separate sample. Pro-environmental behaviors perceived to be more socially appropriate and easier to perform, in particular, are more likely to be chosen. We show that subjective social norms mediate the effect of “global” (widely shared) social norms on behavior, which improves our understanding of the normative processes underlying pro-environmental action. Our use of an incentivized elicitation method might moreover mitigate problems associated with conventional surveys, such as social desirability bias, consistency bias, and inattentive responding, as discussed in the article.