page_title: Campbell paradigm
section_title: Behavioral explanation
hierarchical_section_title: Campbell paradigm / Behavioral explanation
caption_attribution_description: English: Example of conjunctive (moderated) explanation of behavior (here: pro-environmental behavior).
context_page_description: The Campbell paradigm is a behavioral theory from social psychology. The paradigm was developed by social psychologist Florian Kaiser and his colleagues in 2010, building on an earlier suggestion by Donald T. Campbell, after whom the paradigm is named. It offers an explanation of why and when individuals engage in particular behaviors. Its main application is climate and environmental protection behavior.
context_section_description: In social psychology, attitudes have traditionally reflected people's motivation and, thus, their personal behavioral propensities. Analogously, what later became a measure of environmental attitude was initially introduced as a measure of people's propensity to protect the environment. This classical view of attitude as a motivation measure is of course ultimately justified only when one is able to reliably and consistently anticipate manifest behavior with an attitude measure, that is, if the notorious attitude-behavior gap does not really exist.
  The Campbell paradigm's explanation of behavior is extremely parsimonious as can be concluded from the Rasch model. The likelihood of engaging in a behavior is a function of two compensatory factors: a person's attitude and the sociocultural boundary conditions in which the behavior takes place (see Fig. 1). These objective conditions ultimately determine the specific costs of a behavior. Accordingly, a vegetarian lunch is not only the result of people's particular level of environmental attitude but also of the sociocultural boundary conditions in which one's lunch is chosen; for example, the promise of a financial reward makes vegetarian lunches more attractive. The question that remains is “for whom?”
  The literature contains a considerable number of (sometimes contradictory) conjunctive behavioral explanations that speak of the cost-moderated efficacy of people's attitudes (see Fig. 2a). By contrast, the Campbell Paradigm suggests that behavioral costs are unrestrictedly behaviorally effective and independent of people's attitude levels (see Fig. 2b). In other words, financial rewards make vegetarian lunches more probable for everyone. This compensatory relation between behavioral costs and attitude has been repeatedly quasi-experimentally confirmed in environmental protection research.
caption: Fig. 2a: Behavior as the cost-moderated function of individual attitude
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