Undergraduates mistakenly believed that liberal students at their university recycled more than conservatives; inaccurate meta-beliefs may drive political polarization

Collective Responses to Global Challenges: The Social Psychology of Pro-Environmental Action. Markus Barth et al. Journal of Environmental Psychology, February 3 2021, 101562, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101562

Rolf Degen's take: US participants underestimated the actual sustainable actions of conservatives in comparison to liberals.

Abstract: The world faces one of its greatest challenges in climate change. As a global challenge, climate change demands a global response. A psychological approach with the goal to motivate large groups to engage in concerted action will need both, a perspective focused on individual factors and a perspective focused on the collective factors. The social identity approach is a promising and underutilized theoretical basis for the latter. In this special issue, we have brought together new and thought-provoking work on the effects of collective-level variables on pro-environmental action that builds on the social identity approach. This editorial will introduce the core idea of the approach and it will argue for its advantages. We will summarize important previous work on some of the essential variables of the approach and we will briefly introduce the contributions to this special issue which will hopefully stimulate more work in the years ahead.

Keywords: social identityclimate changepro-environmental action

Political ingroup conformity and pro-environmental behavior: Evaluating the evidence from a survey and mousetracking experiments. Nathaniel Geiger et al. Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 72, December 2020, 101524. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2020.101524

Highlights

• Four studies looked at the effect of political ingroup norms on recycling behavior.

• Study 1 demonstrated that university students’ perceptions of ingroup norms predicted self-reported recycling behavior.

• Studies 2–4 examined effects of normative feedback on computerized “recycling behavior” using mousetracking software.

• Results were inconsistent (effects found in Studies 2 and 3, but not 4) but suggest the utility of this novel paradigm.

Abstract: Previous work reveals that political orientation is a relevant social identity for many people and that the desire to conform to political ingroup norms can drive belief and behavior change. Because pro-environmental behaviors are viewed as stereotypically liberal in the US, American conservatives may be less likely to engage in pro-environmental behavior, particularly when political identity and normative information are made salient. In four studies, we examine whether heightening the salience of political identity and providing information that one is conforming to or failing to conform to political group norms influences engagement in a pro-environmental behavior (recycling). Study 1 showed that undergraduates falsely believed that liberal students at their university recycled more than conservatives. In turn, while liberal and moderate students' self-reported recycling behavior was predicted by their perceptions of liberals' (but not conservatives') behavior, conservative students' behavior was predicted by perceptions of other conservatives' (but not liberals’) behavior. Studies 2–4 use a novel computerized recycling task and mouse-tracking software to examine whether, among politically conservative Americans, receiving feedback that their recycling behavior is inconsistent with stereotypic ingroup norms modifies behavior and motivates individuals to “recycle” less in the computerized task. In Studies 2 (university student sample) and 3 (preregistered; MTurk worker sample), those who received this feedback adjusted their automatic, but not deliberate responses, although patterns differed slightly between studies. However, in Study 4 (preregistered; MTurk worker sample), this effect was not found. Collectively, these studies suggest that inaccurate meta-beliefs may drive political polarization with respect to pro-environmental behavior, but inconsistencies in results across studies leave open questions about how they do so. This research also contributes to the literature by introducing new methodologies to study pro-environmental decision-making processes.

Keywords: ConformitySocial identityPolitical identityPro-environmental behaviorDecision-making