Results

Work started in February 2014, and it is expected that the five-year project will reveal differences in how citizens in diverse cultures understand sustainable lifestyles, and that distinct types of interventions to create behavioural spillover will be needed in different cultures.

It is hypothesised that for spillover to occur, there are two pre-conditions:

  1. One’s actions are perceived to be due to one’s own choice, rather than coercion (and, specifically, attributed to being an environmentally-friendly person), and
  2. Spillover actions are seen as sufficiently similar (i.e., they are conceptually linked in people’s minds as being environmentally-friendly).

These assumptions are based on psychological theories (e.g., cognitive dissonance theory, self-perception theory) that demonstrate individuals’ drive for consistency in their behaviour.

So, we expect that spillover will be more likely between similar categories or contexts of behaviour (e.g., waste behaviours, workplace behaviours); and when people believe they are acting out of their own sense of environmental responsibility.

Furthermore, it is hypothesised that cultures where behaviour is ‘internally attributed’ (i.e., seen as primarily due to individual motivations, such as personality, rather than contextual factors, such as wealth or family role) will be more likely than Eastern (collectivist, ‘externally attributed’) cultures to experience behavioural spillover when the above pre-conditions are in place. The project will explore, however, whether spillover may occur under different circumstances in more collectivist cultures.

The project will also expose the links between ‘private-sphere’ (i.e., consumption) and ‘public-sphere’ (political, community) environmentally-friendly behaviours, and codify this in new theory. It also represents the first attempt to study sustainable lifestyles from a cross-cultural perspective. This will help open up developments in lifestyle and social change interventions with real-world benefits to policy-makers and non-governmental organisations attempting to address climate change and other sustainability issues, as well as advancing behavioural and sustainability science by significantly broadening our understanding of behaviour within both individuals and cultures.

We have published findings on spillover previously. For example our research on the spillover potential of the Welsh carrier bag charge: http://orca.cf.ac.uk/51201/.  And before this, work looking at how consistent people are across a range of green behaviours: http://orca.cf.ac.uk/20442/.