Supporting and expressing support for environmental policies

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Authors

eople 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
Volume87
Number of pages10
ISSN0272-4944
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 05.2023
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors

    Research areas

  • Acceptance, Campbell paradigm, Conservation (ecological behavior), Environmental attitudes, Environmental policy support
  • Psychology