Psychological Mechanisms And Influencing Factors Of Spillover Between Pro-environmental Behaviors

It is widely believed that human behavior is,at least partly,responsible for many environmental problems.Understanding individual pro-environmental behavior(PEB)is one of the most important issues within the domain of environmental management.Research on resident environmental behavior has been recently paying more attention to investigating spillover between distinctive PEBs,a phenomenon that performing one PEB may increase(positive spillover)or reduce(negative spillover)the likelihood of individual adoption of other PEBs causally.From a practitioner perspective,such spillover is of urgent importance for policymakers.One the one hand,it reveals that behavioral public policies have the potential to achieve greater returns if they could elicit positive spillover from the targeted to nontargeted PEBs.On the other hand,if negative spillover is common,the effects of behavioral interventions are actually overestimated,because they instead reduce individual participation in other PEBs spontaneously.From an academic perspective,research into behavioral spillover is intriguing as it uncovers the complex behavioral ecologies implicit in individual PEB performance,thus improving the fundamental theories for environmental behavior and management.Besides,by capturing the broader ripples of behavior interventions,it also contributes to the development of behavioral public administration and policy science.Yet,our understanding of two critical issues concerning behavioral spillover is still limited.First,why does spillover occur? Past research has proposed several distinct psychological processes to explain spillover,while they are not tied together in a comprehensive framework and even conflict with each other.More importantly,none of them make explicit the nature of spillover and can explain the question of why past PEB sometimes promotes,while at other times inhibits other PEBs.Therefore,prior theories cannot provide a generalized explanation for both positive and negative spillover.Second,when does spillover happen? The occurrence of spillover usually depends on specific factors.Nonetheless,knowledge of the triggers of spillover is still incomplete and limited.To help fill these gaps,this study conducted theoretical and experimental research to investigate the psychological mechanisms and influencing factors of spillover between individual environmentally responsible actions.The main contribution of the theoretical research is to develop a meta-cognitive model centered on individual self-inference process to trace spillover back to its source and pinpoint its key mechanisms,based on the assumption of bounded rationality and insights from several behavioral theories.In this model,environmental behavioral spillover can be boiled down to the self-inference process within a sequence of PEB choices,in which people with imperfect knowledge of their true preferences over environmental protection use their past PEB to infer the relative importance of proenvironmental goals and make the current environmental decision.Crucially,individual commitments towards pro-environmental goals and environmentalist self-identity constitute the key mechanisms underlying spillover.Specifically,when people represent past behavior in terms of their commitment towards environmental protection,past PEB is more likely to increase individual commitments towards environmental goals and self-identity,thus facilitating positive spillover.Conversely,when people consider prior behavior as evidence of having made progress towards environmental sustainability,the same behavior would instead reduce two commitments and thereby induce negative spillover.As such,the self-inference model provides a comprehensive framework that unities past conflicting explanations for positive and negative spillover.We further scrutinized the variations in self-inference process systematically based on personal values,behavioral difficulty,policy interventions,and social norms,to identify the potential factors that would modify behavioral spillover.We conducted two experiments to test the proposed mediators and moderators for spillover,in which the causal relationship between household waste separation behavior and other private and public PEBs were examined.In the survey experiment on residents from more than one hundred communities(N=4253),we reminded subjects of their past participation in waste sorting,and manipulated their perceptions on this behavior.In the field quasi-experiment(N=200),we further tested the spillover effects during the process of household waste separation practice.The findings provide solid evidence in support of our theoretical models,which show that:(1)a reduction in two commitments mediated the negative spillover of waste separation,while an increase in commitment towards pro-environmental goals mediated the positive spillover from waste sorting;(2)either positive or negative spillover could hardly happen to PEBs with high difficulty level;(3)positive spillover was more likely to occur under environmental appeals,while negative spillover was more likely to happen under economic incentives;(4)people embedded in the communities with strong norms of PEBs were more likely to display negative spillover compared with their counterparts in community with poor norms of environmental protection.Contrary to the hypotheses,however,individual commitment towards environmental self-identity could not explain the occurrence of positive spillover,and personal values had litter effect on spillover.Our findings inform policymakers to develop behavioral environmental policies.First of all,policymakers should take behavioral spillover into account when designing and evaluating behavioral public policies.They can conduct field experiments to measure the exact scope and extent of spillover from the targeted to nontargeted PEBs.Also,they should be alert to the incompatibility between policies within the same portfolio due to the negative spillover among PEBs targeted by different policies.To maximize the likelihood of positive spillover,policymakers can rely more on environmental appeals to encourage public engagement in environmentally friendly actions.Notably,they need to be cautious with the application of economic incentives.Besides,they should pay more attention to the social contexts where policies are implemented,and make individual sequential behaviors more consistent with the PEB norms.Also,reducing the difficulty of nontargeted PEBs is another promising way to inspire positive spillover under the environmental framing.Future study needs to investigate other spillover triggers,monitor the long-term trend of spillover over time,and explore the spillover in the mirror,that is,how expectation of future PEB influences individual current environmental decision.