2. Behavioral Spillovers in Environmental Behavior

Favorable environmental behavior in daily life can make a substantial contribution in tackling current environmental challenges. For understanding and influencing environmental behavior, knowledge on behavioral spillovers is crucial: How does one beneficial act affect subsequent environmental behavior? Recent studies on behavioral spillovers observed two opposing phenomena: Moral consistency describes a gratifying effect where people’s subsequent behavior is improved due to a first favorable action. Moral self-licensing depicts people’s tendency for adverse conduct subsequent to a beneficial initial behavior. Two questions are pertinent: (1) Which environmental behaviors are linked and could be prone to spillover effects? (2) Which economic and psychological factors might moderate whether moral consistency or moral self-licensing is more likely to occur? In a first study, we administer a survey with a representative sample of the Swiss population and investigate correlations among a range of environmental behaviors that extends the scope of previous studies. We identify four clusters of environmental behavior that are strongly connected to each other. A second study employs an online experiment that tests proposed moderators of moral consistency and moral self-licensing effects. We find that none of the examined moderators is capable of triggering moral self-licensing in the realm of environmental behavior. However, our evidence shows that generally more closely related behaviors are more susceptible to behavioral spillovers as compared to distantly related behaviors.