The Effects Of Social Comparison On Environmental Impression And Behavior

As economic development, the increasingly serious environmental problems have become an important factor in the threat to human survival and development. The "Thirteen Five Plan" clearly pointed out the need of strengthening environmental governance and ecological civilization construction, while the root of environmental problems is inappropriate human behavior, the basic solution method to solve environmental problems is increasing people’s environmental behavior. However, previous studies are more concerned with the impact of environmental attitude on behavior, less attention to other factors, such as social comparison. Social comparison is a prevalent phenomenon in our daily life, will not only affect our cognition, self-evaluation, and emotional responses, but also has different impact on people’s behavior. Contrasting with others can provide people a standard for themselves, to evaluate their actions and decide subsequent behaviors, which can promote environmental protection. Therefore, this study aims to adopt social comparison theory to explore whether and how social comparison will effect environmental behavior by two studies.Study 1 explores the impact of social comparison on environmental behavior from group level, including a pre-test and two sub-experiments. The purpose of the pre-experiment is to find reference groups which can be used to compare with Nanjing people. Results shows comparing to Nanjing people, the most environmentally friendly group is Hangzhou people, but the least environmentally friendly group is Peking man.Experiment 1 discusses whether the direction of social comparison will affect the environmental impression and behavior of Nanjing people under implicit social comparison. The result shows there is contrast effect on environmental impression of Nanjing people, but no significant difference between environmental behaviors. Besides, the place identification of Nanjing may predict their environmental behavior.Experiment 2 explores if the direction of social comparison will affect the environmental impression and behavior of Nanjing people or not under explicit social comparison. We find that it exists upward assimilation effect, but no significant difference in environmental behavior between three groups neither. And the group identification of Nanjing people can predict their environmental behavior.Social comparison occurs both on group and individual level, so Experiment 3 demonstrates the effect of social comparison on individual environmental impression, behavioral intention, and actual behavior from interpersonal perspective. The result shows the interaction of comparison directions and methods on environmental impression and behavioral intention, of which there is contrast effect on impression and intention under implicit comparison, assimilation effect on intention under explicit comparison, and a mediate effect of impression between social comparison and behavioral intention, but no significant difference between actual behaviors.Above all, this research has confirmed social comparison has some impact on environmental impression and behavior. The goal of improving our environmental behavior can be done by making interpersonal comparison, which means when comparing with downward people (who is less environmental than us), we will consider ourselves better than him and make environmental protection under implicit comparison, and when comparing with upward people (who is more environmental than us), we may think ourselves environmental and increase our behavior.