Individualizing proenvironmental behavior in the context of structural impediments

Abstract

Proenvironmental behaviors are plentiful, and, in their entirety, they may overwhelm people, as they cannot act on all of them. Plagued by feelings of helplessness, people may give up trying to protect the environment altogether. We argue that investigating the sources and consequences of choice overload in the context of proenvironmental behavior will help to understand how people can find direction and energy to act toward protecting the environment despite structural challenges. We first propose that more public information regarding what kind of proenvironmental behavior benefits which environmental outcomes should improve people’s understanding of action effectiveness; when provided in a veridical and interactive way, such information should give people direction. Second, rules set by contextual sources that respect people’s need for autonomy and freedom should provide further direction. When institutions lack guidelines through providing clear information and set rules, people need to find direction within themselves. Thus, third, we posit that applying the self-regulation strategy of mental contrasting will allow people to find direction by themselves, and it will provide the energy needed to walk the cumbersome path of reaching proenvironmental outcomes. Using mental contrasting will also enable people to drop proenvironmental actions for which they do not have the required resources. We discuss how social engineering (s-frame) combined with applying self-regulation tools (i-frame) will allow people to individualize their proenvironmental behavior, escaping potentially paralyzing choice overload and working around structural barriers.