Pro-environmental and Pro-social Behavior

In two ongoing research projects, together with a team of environmental psychologists, we investigate the connection between pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes and how these can be used to predict behavior. In the first article (currently under review at an economics journal with IF 6.6) we surveyed students and non-students to measure their pro-environmental attitude and to predict purchase decisions. As a theoretical foundation, we investigate the limits of neo-classical and behavioral economics in the context of discrete choice and apply the Rasch Model from psychology as an extension to them. Our results indicate that specific purchasing decisions can be predicted without subjective utility considerations but using our developed scale.

In the second project, we link one of the most common ways to investigate pro-environmental behavior in economics (the public goods experiment) with two scales from psychology. One is a standard scale from the literature, and the second is specifically developed to assess the behavioral costs and benefits of human behavior. We link this psychological research in surveys with a novel experimental design from economics. Using the strategy approach and a between-subjects experiment we achieve a finely granular distinction between the role of MPCR and group size on contribution behavior. Lastly, we can predict contributions to a public good using the newly developed survey.