Economic Psychology and Pro‐Environmental Behaviour

This chapter applies existing knowledge in the field of economic psychology to the domain of pro‐environmental behaviour. The field of economic psychology has generated a range of valuable concepts, theories and empirical insights useful when assessing the influence of psychological processes and translating them into effective policy. The chapter conceptualizes environmental problems as large‐scale social dilemmas, in which individuals have to trade off self‐interest and collective interest, now and later. This requires them to deal with probabilities and complex information. Personal norms are an individual's felt obligations toward a certain behaviour. There is an increasing volume of research demonstrating the usefulness of the social norms approach as a means to regulate environmental behaviour. Researchers who view pro‐environmental behaviour primarily as caused by pro‐social motivations, often base their research on the value‐belief‐norm theory of environmentalism (VBN theory) and the theory it is based on, the norm‐activation model (NAM)