A post by Christopher J. Hopwood
Climate change is arguably the most serious current threat to existence as we know it, and the problem is worsening. The Kyoto and Paris agreements, increasing international popularity of Green Parties, and rapidly shifting norms around energy production, trade, transportation, waste, and commerce, all underscore intensified global awareness of this issue. International organizations and national governments seem to be realizing, to varying degrees, that if we don’t do something about climate change soon, life will be much less pleasant in the near future.
Policies designed to decelerate climate change and mitigate its impacts typically focus on population-level interventions involving taxes, regulations, or large-scale publicity campaigns. However, these kinds of interventions do not take into account the fact that people will respond differently to the same incentives. Individuals behave in ways that are more less sustainable on a day-to-day basis, and these behaviors can accumulate to have dramatic impacts. A single person living in North America or Europe who changed from eating meat regularly to a plant-based diet could spare the atmosphere of around 3,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is an important factor of our warming atmosphere. Taking public transportation rather than driving a car regularly could spare 2,000 kilograms. Recycling plastic rather than throwing it away would save another 100 kilograms.
Variation in these kinds of behaviors can be explained in part by opportunity, wealth, cultural norms, and public policy. But demographic factors do not fully explain how people behave. Many proenvironmental behaviors require changes in personal values or the adoption of habits associated with individual sacrifices, and people are likely to differ in their willingness and abilities to make such decisions and sacrifices. In other words, some people are more likely to engage in sustainable behaviors because of the kind of people they are.
As personality psychologists, we can do our part to combat climate change by contributing to knowledge about what kind of people are more or less likely to behave sustainably. A recent meta-analysis led by Alistair Soutter and colleagues in Perspectives on Psychological Science summarized concurrent associations between personality traits and sustainability attitudes and behaviors. The study suggested that people who are more honest/humble, conscientious, agreeable, open to experience, and extraverted are more likely to be climate conscious. It is now pretty clear that certain personalities are more conducive to environmentally responsible attitudes and behaviors, on average.
But it is also clear that people change. Over the last couple of years, my colleagues and I have become interested in the kinds of personality changes that are associated with increases in proenvironmental behavior. In one study with 58,748 German participants, we found that environmental concerns increased modestly from 2009-2017 in the German population on average. However, findings also indicated that relative increases in concern were related to increases in the personality traits openness to experience, neuroticism, and agreeableness. In fact, changes in openness explained about half of the variance in changes in environmental concerns.
In a second study, to be published in an upcoming issue of the European Journal of Personality, we used data from 61,479 participants in New Zealand to test preregistered hypotheses about how personality co-develops with a wider range of sustainable attitudes. Those attitudes included how much people value the environment, believe in and are concerned about climate change, are willing and able to make personal environmental sacrifices, and support the Green Party. We largely replicated the findings from Soutter and colleagues in finding concurrent correlations between broad personality traits – particularly Agreeableness, Openness, and Honesty/Humility – and sustainable attitudes and behaviors. Perhaps most interesting, we found that personality changes – especially in agreeableness – were consistently related to relative changes in proenvironmental positions.
Why does this matter? First, there is a large body of literature on the kinds of people who care more and are willing to do more about the environment, encompassing hundreds of individual difference variables. The unique value of personality psychology is that it accounts for the whole person – personality traits can bring order to this literature by placing these hundreds of variables within evidence-based personality trait models. Second, we have a fairly good understanding of how personality traits change normatively. When married to knowledge about how traits and trait changes are related to proenvironmental behavior, this knowledge can help policymakers make predictions about who is most likely to help or hurt the climate crisis. For instance, we know that young adults are likely to increase in the kinds of traits that are associated with responsible behavior. Pending research, we mind find that young people are, counterintuitively, not the most cost-efficient population in which to invest educational resources, because they are likely to change in helpful ways all on their own. Wiebke Bleidorn and colleagues recently argued in the American Psychologist that, historically, personality psychologists have been shy about engaging in policy discussions and thus are often not invited to the policy table. Nevertheless, we have something to say and should be more forward in saying it. Climate change policy is an exemplar domain in which evidence from personality psychology could improve decision making.
But this is, so to speak, just the tip of the iceberg. A number of things need to happen for personality psychology to fulfil its potential in helping our species combat the climate crisis that we largely created. First, in order to summarize existing research, connections between the kinds of variables commonly studied in environmental psychology and personality traits would need to be confirmed empirically. In a number of papers, Peter Gollwitzer has proposed a model that included several steps required for individuals to engage in certain kinds of behaviors, including choosing, planning, executing, and evaluating. Various motives, strategies, behaviors, and perceptions can be organized within those domains, and then mapped onto personality traits. However, considerable work needs to be done to confirm this kind of mapping, in order to better embed the value of personality psychology in current scholarly thinking about proenvironmental behavior.
Second, personality studies need to incorporate a richer set of sustainable attitudes and behaviors in order to identify specific links between these domains. Existing large sample studies, including the ones I described above, are relatively limited along these lines. For instance, the studies we have done so far have mostly measured proenvironmental attitudes, thus we have a lot to learn about how personality and personality change are related to sustainable behaviors. Even so, there are a lot of ways individuals can help or hurt the climate. Examples include, but are not limited to, how they use resources, how they get around, how they eliminate waste, the kinds of products they buy, and how they engage with others. Studies focused explicitly on connecting personality to a wider range of variables are an important next step in this area of research.
Finally, longitudinal and experimental work is needed to go beyond concurrent associations toward the identification of developmental and causal connections between personality and proenvironmental behavior. We hope that our recent studies will inspire this kind of work, but we have a long way to go – and not much time to get there.
The climate crisis is an emergency. Personality psychology can help, but to do so, we must work together, be smart, and act fast.