The Effect Of Relative Values On Environmental Decision Making

Value orientation is an important factor affecting individuals' behaviors and decision-making.The previous studies,however,indicate that most often there exist obvious gap and inconsistency between people's environmental values and pro-environment behaviors.This phenomenon,to a large extent,is due to the fact that researchers ignore the potential monetary component involved in environmental decision-making and the effect of monetary values.According to the low-cost theory,the unidirectional environmental orientation will not be sufficient to overcome the cost limits and make individuals maintain pro-environment tendencies.Thus,the present research focused on the effect of the relative strength between individual's monetary and environmental values on the risky decision-making when taking monetary and environmental gains together.Studies have pointed out that value orientation is an important component of the formation of individual's self-identity,and that the self-reflective view of one's value-identity mediates the effect of value orientation on behaviors.The Identity-based Motivation model argues that self-identity has a motivational function and advocates the consistency of one's behavior and his/her identity;while the Symbolic Self-Completion Theory develops the goal-oriented self-study,regarding self-completion as the goal pursuit in one's behaviors and decision-making.Combined with the above theoretical points of view,it is believed that the relative values can effectively predict individual's risk preference for the composite gains through the activation of relative value-identity and its corresponding self-completion motivation.The results of study I indicated that individuals with different relative values would differ in value evaluation and risk preference on the composite gains.The effect remained consistent whenever the relative values were measured by scale(Exp 1),Implicit Association Test(Exp 2),or primed by scrambled-words task(Exp 3).Environment-oriented individuals tended to assign larger weights to the environmental gain in the composite than did money-oriented ones.In addition,compared to money-oriented individuals,environment-oriented individuals were more inclined to take risk in money for the sake of ensuring environmental benefits and more risk-seeking for an extra environmental improvement in the composite outcomes.Based on study I,study II further explored the role of self-completion motivation in the impact of relative values on composite environmental decision-making.We primed different self-completion motivation levels through adjusting the relation between one's actual self-identity construction and his/her relative value-identity and observed the changes of risk preferences in the composite decision-making.The results showed that,whether it was based on the internal self-completion of behavior recall(Exp 4),or based on the external self-completion of bogus social feedback(Exp 5),obtaining and accumulating the value-oriented consistent symbols induced licensing effect that the pro-environment tendencies of environment-oriented individuals and the pro-money tendencies of money-oriented individuals in the composite risky choices were both significantly weakened.In contrast,when the value-oriented inconsistent symbols were obtained and accumulated,the difference between the actual self-identity construction through internal path and one's value-identity enhanced the individual's self-completion motivation and thus promoted the occurrence of the compensation behaviors;while the difference between the actual self-identity construction through external path and one's value-identity could not effectively activate the self-completion motivation and the "social realization" of value-oriented incoherent symbols make individuals more likely to show the decision preference consisting with the actual self-identity.Overall,our explorations of the influence of relative values on composite money-environment risky decision-making and its psychological mechanism not only expand the research paradigm of environmental decision-making and redefine the relation between value orientation and environmental behaviors,but also help to explain the indirectness and limitation of this influence in dynamic decision process from the perspective of self-completion motivation.In addition,the research also suggests us that we can promote the pro-environment tendencies of different value-oriented individuals in the tradeoff between monetary and environmental gains through corresponding internal or external self-identity construction processes.