New Publication: Supporting and expressing support for environmental policies
Available free of charge at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.101997
Kaiser, F. G., Gerdes, R. & König, F. (2023). Supporting and expressing support for environmental policies. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 87, 101997.
Abstract:
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.
Highlights:
-Citizens' support for effective environmental policies is crucial in democracies.
-Expressing support for a policy is behavior aimed at protecting the environment.
-Environmental policy support is controlled by a person's environmental attitude.
-Support is also controlled by the costs that accompany a specific policy.
-Only a populace with strong environmental attitudes supports effective policies.