Spillover of pro-environmental consumer behavior

Summary

To limit climate change, it is important that people cause less greenhouse gases. Pro-environmental behavior, such as insulating one’s home, cycling more often, not travelling by plane, or eating less meat, contributes to this. These different types of behavior are not unrelated. Performing one behavior appears to affect subsequent behavior. In this thesis these so-called behavioral spillovers were investigated. Both positive spillovers, where the first pro-environmental behavior leads to another pro-environmental

behavior, and negative spillovers, where the first pro-environmental behavior actually leads to environmentally-unfriendly behavior, occur. Through interviews and surveys, we investigated the extent to which positive and negative spillovers occur and the extent to which certain circumstances affect spillovers, including the degrees of similarity and difficulty of the first and subsequent behavior. More knowledge on how to encourage positive spillovers and to counter negative spillovers can help boost more sustainable consumption patterns.