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What sets the environmentally aware apart?

30.6.2020

Translation: Eva Francis

Whether or not we try to protect nature also depends on our personality. Researchers have identified unique characteristics of environmentally aware people.

Some people take the bike to go shopping, buy bamboo toothbrushes to avoid using plastic and try to prevent producing any packaging waste, yet others still find it difficult to behave in an environmentally manner. There are many underlying reasons: our age, values, political preferences and childhood experiences with nature and conservation all play a role. Our personality also affects the size of our ecological footprint. This is the result of a meta-analysis by a team of researchers around Alistair Raymond Bryce Soutter of the University of Edinburgh.

For the study, he and his team analysed 38 studies with a total of more than 44,000 test subjects. The studies registered the tendency of participants to think and act in an environmentally aware manner in various ways. In some of them, subjects were asked about their ecological attitudes; in others, the researchers studied how well the subjects separated their waste and whether they donated money to environmental causes. The studies assessed the traits of participants using two different models. On the one hand, they employed the «five-factor model» (big five), describing the personalities of people using five different characteristics: conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, openness to experience and neuroticism. Other studies used the HEXACO model, which additionally includes the honesty-humility dimension.

Open people are environmentally aware

The study showed that the environmentally aware are, on average, very open. They are also imaginative, inquisitive and open to experimentation, and tend to question norms and values more readily. Moreover, environmentally aware test subjects achieved higher scores on honesty-humility, which surprised Soutter and his team of researchers. Honest and humble people shy away from exploiting others. The same might apply to natural resources, hypothesise the researchers. The traits agreeableness and conscientiousness also correlated with environmentally aware acting and thinking – although the connection was a bit weaker.

Awareness of the personality traits of environmentalists and polluters can help derive better approaches for conservation campaigns. Tailoring these campaigns to those who are not particularly open or honest might pay off, conclude the researchers. For example, by focusing less on new and hip ways to protect the environment and more on tried-and-tested methods. Of by stressing the personal benefits of environmental protection more.

Spektrum der Wissenschaft

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Original article at Spektrum.de (in German)

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