Supporting and expressing support for environmental policies

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People engage in all kinds of behaviors because they aim to protect the environment. Among other actions, such behaviors involve supporting and expressing support for environmental policies. In this article, we investigated two forces that control people's environmental policy support: their commitment to protecting the environment (conceptually speaking, people's environmental attitudes) and the corollaries of a policy (i.e., policy-specific costs) that need to be offset by an individual's environmental attitude. We surveyed two convenience samples (N1 = 248; N2 = 176) on their support for a whole array of different environmental policies that came with various costly corollaries and, more specifically, for a range of CO2 taxes. We found that verbal expressions of support for environmental policies reflect people's environmental attitudes, and we subsequently corroborated this finding in a preregistered replication (N = 450). Fittingly, we also found that people who express support for higher CO2 taxes hold progressively stronger environmental attitudes.
Original languageEnglish
Article number101997
JournalJournal of Environmental Psychology
Volume2023
Issue number87
ISSN0272-4944
Publication statusPublished - 2023