It's not easy being green: the effects of self-regulation and conflicting social norms on pro-environmental intentions and behaviours

Climate change has become an increasing global concern, and while people generally accept the importance of the issue, their attitudes often do not translate into pro-environmental behaviours. To contribute to the understanding of why this might be happening, the current study investigated the effect of ego-depletion and social norms on young people's pro-environmental intentions and behaviours. An experiment was conducted to manipulate injunctive and descriptive social norms (norm congruence: aligned vs. conflict) and self-regulation (ego-depletion: low vs. high). Participants were 80 students (57 female, 22 male) recruited from the University of Queensland (M = 19.85, SD = 2.77). Participants were either exposed to a supportive injunctive norm and supportive descriptive norm (norms-aligned), or a supportive injunctive norm and unsupportive descriptive norm (norm-conflict) for pro-environmental behaviours. There was tentative support for the prediction insofar as an interaction, between ego-depletion and norm congruence, showed that when participants were ego-depleted and viewed conflicting norms, they had lower pro-environmental intentions than participants who were ego-depleted and viewed aligned norms (positive injunctive norm and positive descriptive norms). Only tentative support was found for the interaction as only one significant effect and one marginally significant effect was found out of five dependent variables. Results also supported previous research demonstrating that aligned norms are more effective than conflicting norms at influencing intentions and behaviours. While only tentative support was found the experiment does indicate that a relationship exists between ego-depletion and social norms. Future research, however, is needed to confirm the extent of this relationship