Environmental Attitudes and Contextual Stimuli in the Emerging Environmental Culture: An Empirical Study from Russia

Abstract

The state of the environment inevitably depends on human activity and behavioral patterns that determine everyday decisions at the individual level. This impact turns out to be especially critical when the environmental culture is not formed and there are no positive social and context inducements. In this paper, based on a randomized experimental design, we investigate how some psychological factors such as attitudes and contextual stimuli influence the tendency towards greener behavior and the choice of eco-friendly everyday practices. We distinguish four types of everyday eco-friendly and pro-ecological behavior (recycling, eco-shopping, resource saving, eco-mobility) and analyze whether the choice in favor of a particular behavior is resistant to situational stimuli of an emotional and rational nature. Also, we clarify how the extent of pro-ecological activity is homogeneous at the individual level under conditions of the emerging environmental culture (using the example of Russia).

By using data of an online survey of 330 respondents aged 14 to 67 from 81 Russian cities, we constructed an index of the tendency towards pro-ecological behavior and built models to test three main hypotheses about a society with an emerging environmental culture: H1. Eco-behavior is not homogeneous – a tendency towards one type of eco-behavior does not determine a tendency towards another; H2. People usually overestimate their own tendency towards eco-behavior and underestimate the tendency of others; H3. Tendency towards one or another type of eco-behavior is not persistent and influenced by emotional and rational stimuli.