Understanding environmental decision making: The association between stages of decision making and decisional conflict

Introduction: As research highlights how climate change impacts individual and planetary health, people might consider reducing their ecological footprint by acting pro-environmentally. However, their choice might depend on how far along they are in the process of deciding to act pro-environmentally (i.e., different stages of decision making) and on their experienced difficulty in deciding in favour of the environment and which behaviour to conduct (i.e., decisional conflict).

Methods: To explore in which stage participants find themselves (i.e., not yet thinking about choices, showing interest in doing so, actively considering options, approaching a decision, having already decided but remaining open to reconsideration, or being firmly committed to a decision with little chance of change) and whether their respective stages are correlated with their experienced decisional conflict, an online, cross-sectional questionnaire was distributed among a convenience sample of 418 English-, Dutch-, and Italian-speaking adults to measure participants’ demographics, stages, and extent to which they experience decisional conflict.

Results: Based on regression analyses, we observed that participants who were further along in the stages experienced less decisional conflict.

Conclusion: Therefore, we suggest that interventions (e.g., decision aids) take stages into account to better meet users’ needs and assist people in making environmental decisions.