Understanding decisional conflict around environmental decisions and the influence of stages of decision making.
Creators: name: Richelli, Letizia
name: Vissers, Eline
name: Gorini, Alessandra
name: Meijers, Marijn
name: Ruiter, Robert
name: Smit, Eline
name: Gültzow, Thomas
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
subject: Decisional conflict
subject: Decision making
subject: Motivation toward the environment
subject: Preference for Intuition and Deliberation
subject: Pro-environmental behaviours
subject: Reasoned Action Approach
subject: Stages of decision making

description: Acknowledgement: For this pre-registration, we adapted our proposal to the guidelines from guidelines available on OSF: "Pre-Registration in Social Psychology (van 't Veer &amp; Giner-Sorolla, 2016)". Environmental considerations are becoming increasingly important and there are multiple behavioural options (e.g., different behaviours that relate to recycling, re-using, energy usage etc.) that individuals can choose from to improve their environmental impact. These behaviours differ in the extent they impact the environment, and are not equally affordable, nor equally easy to execute. As a result, people might experience uncertainty in pursue few, or many, of these behaviours. Despite the intention to behave in favour of the environment, one might assume that it is difficult for people to make decisions about the environment on an everyday basis. It is currently unknown if individuals do in fact experience this process as being difficult, and how this influences their environmental behaviours. Similarly, considerable heterogeneity is expected to exist regarding the extent to which people redirect their thoughts, and consequently their behaviours, towards the environment. Specifically, individuals may find themselves in different stages of decision making. For example, one person might just start to think about how to behave more environmentally friendly, while another person may already perform certain pro-environmental behaviours yet wants to become even more environmentally friendly. This may influence the perceived difficulty of the choice to be made. Moreover, we do not know whether experiencing decisional conflict could be related to underlying decisional processes like having a preference for intuitive and/or deliberative decision making. In order to explore these considerations, an online survey is being distributed to adults (i.e., 18 years and older) to investigate to what extent individuals perceive decisional conflict when deciding about engaging in pro-environmental behaviours (RQ 1). Moreover, we will look at whether decisional conflict regarding the decision to engage in pro-environmental behaviours is associated with (not) engaging in pro-environmental behaviours (RQ 2) and whether having a preference for intuitive and/or deliberative decision making moderates the effect of decisional conflict on pro-environmental behaviours (RQ 3). Next, we will examine in which decisional stage individuals find themselves around environmental decision making (RQ 4) and whether the stage people find themselves in is related to decisional conflict (RQ 5). For this research, we use an anonymous questionnaire that is being distributed among a convenience sample of English-, Dutch- and Italian-speaking adults. Consent is provided online, and we do not foresee any negative consequences for the participants. Participants do not receive any monetary compensation for filling in the survey.