title: Human behavior in environmental decision-making
Creators: name: Hauser, David
Publisher: name: Universität Bern
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: 330 Economics
subject: 650 Management &amp; public relations

description: Behavioral economics combines psychological insights with economic decision-making to understand why people behave as they do and how to steer human behavior in desired directions. Specifically, the use of laboratory or field experiments allows behavioral economists to identify causal relationships between an experimental manipulation by a researcher and certain human behavior. Explaining human behavior can be one of the most exciting tasks for a behavioral scientist, and at the same time, it can be like squeezing water from a stone. For example, there are people who collect yogurt cup lids all year or recycle their tea bags in three different ways to protect the planet but still fly to Bali once a year. Among other things, it is mainly the lack of understanding of the consequences of human behavior on the environment, which has severe and detrimental effects on the world’s climate, causing ecological, economic, and social crises. A new field of research — behavioral environmental economics — applies theories of behavioral economics to environmental issues to explain puzzles of individual behavior regarding the environment. This thesis is a collection of four essays that contribute to the nascent field of behavioral environmental economics. Essays 1 and 2 address the need for simple measurements to capture people’s belief in climate change and pro-environmental behavior. Essays 3 and 4 are about how to understand and promote pro-environmental behavior.
In essay 1, we address the need to assess people’s belief in climate change with one item. Thus, our developed single item aims to provide researchers with a brief but psychometrically valid instrument for assessing belief in climate change. This is helpful when researchers conduct more extensive surveys and including multiple-item assessments is too costly or unfeasible. We consider three critical aspects of climate change in the single item, namely, the occurrence of climate change, that climate change is detrimental, and that climate change is caused by humans. In highly powered samples, we find that our single item is correlated with established constructs measuring belief in climate change. Moreover, the convergent, predictive, and discriminant validity of our single item supports the validity and usage of our single item.
In essay 2, we validate the Tree Task, an incentivized task that measures pro-environmental behavior in laboratory or field experiments. Short, vivid, and easy to explain, the Tree Task enriches existing tasks that measure pro-environmental behavior. In the Tree Task, participants have to weigh immediate financial rewards for themselves and long-term benefits for the environment. In other words, participants receive money that they can keep for themselves, or they can plant trees to mitigate climate change. As expected, we find in the experiment that higher costs per tree lead to fewer trees planted and that trees with a higher carbon dioxide offset are planted more frequently. In addition, we demonstrate that the number of trees planted correlates with established self-reports capturing environmental attitudes and intentions, belief in climate change, and values in line with pro-environmental behavior. Therefore, we recommend the use of the Tree Task as a valid measure for assessing pro-environmental behavior.
In essay 3, we experimentally investigate how priming on future events unrelated to an environmental context influences individual pro-environmental behavior. We use the Tree Task as the primary outcome variable to measure pro-environmental behavior. In the Tree Task, people choose between keeping money for themselves or investing money in planting trees and thus mitigating climate change. As a secondary outcome variable, we assess self-reported pro-environmental intentions. The results show that people who are primed on positive and negative future events statistically significantly plant more trees and show higher pro-environmental intentions than people primed on leisure activities in the control group. The difference in the trees planted between positive and negative future event priming is statistically insignificant. Exploring different potential mechanisms behind our results, we find that both future primes activated greater concern for the future and the environment, whereas the leisure prime triggered present concerns. While these results align with our research question, we cannot rule out that the leisure priming may have activated other concerns, unrelated to the present or future, potentially leading to fewer trees planted.
In essay 4, we explore how gain and loss framing can promote voluntary pro-environmental behavior. Building on loss aversion, a core concept in behavioral economics, we assume that people work more under a loss frame than under a gain frame. In the experiment, people can choose to work on a real effort task and generate donations for a reforestation organization to mitigate climate change or refuse to work and advance to the next task. In the gain frame, with every completed task, the researchers sequentially increase the donation amount. In the loss frame, with every incomplete task, the total donation amount is reduced. Both gain and loss framing are economically equivalent. The results reveal that people in the loss treatment solve more tasks. However, the treatment effect is weak and marginally statistically significant. Interestingly, the effect of the loss frame increases and is statistically significant when controlling for people with low intrinsic motivation to protect the environment. This finding opens a novel avenue for future researchers to tailor gain and loss framing according to people’s environmental values.