Varför agerar individer i förmån av miljön? : En undersökning om hur olika drivkrafter samt andra faktorer kan ligga till grund för pro-ekologiska beteenden.

This study explored what motives underlie ecological behaviour and additionally if these motives had a relation to environmental knowledge, environmental attitudes and the performance of ecological behavior. Drawing on a present motivation studie, five different motivations, namely Reputation building; Environmental concern; Warm-glow feeling; Individual gain and Reluctant altruism were used to investigate what motivates individuals to pro-ecological behaviour. The ecological behaviours that were used throughout the study were sampled from the General Ecological Behaviour scale. To obtain measurements of environmental attitudes items were collected from the New Ecological Paradigm scale. The variable environmental knowledge was divided into two parts, tested and self estimated, where items were gathered and inspired from present studies. An electronic questionnaire survey, consisting of several subsections, was used to obtain a representative sample of Swedish citizens (n = 602). Data was analyzed through ANOVA, post hoc tests, correlation analysis and linear regression analysis with model comparison. The main findings indicated that there were variance between motives for different types of ecological behaviour. Furthermore, motives that reflect Individual gain or a feeling of Warm-glow were the overall strongest motives for pro-ecological behaviour. Lastly, the result showed that there were some weak correlations between the Environmental concern motive and a pro-ecological attitude, self estimated environmental knowledge and behaving pro-ecologically, while tested environmental knowledge did not show any significant relation to any of the motives. The underlying factors of ecological behaviour is a complex construct that needs to be further researched and updated throughout time and environmental changes.