Behavioral sustainable mobility: Insights into the cognitive and motivational drivers of individuals’ preferences

Individuals can considerably contribute to mitigating climate change by adopting environmentally friendly behaviors. Environmental behaviors are importantly driven by motivational processes reflected in personal motives and as values constituting individuals' social identity. However, general measures of personal motives, such as environmental concern, tend to insufficiently explain environmental behaviors. Moreover, it remains unclear which role past-framed messaging may take in increasing conservatives’ climate policy support by more strongly aligning with tradition motives that are central to a conservative political identity. The satisfaction of motives, which maximizes individuals’ utility, constitutes, however, merely one category of drivers of environmental behavior. Largely neglected cognitive processes, such as cognitive biases and motive-irrelevant characteristics of the decision context, which are unrelated to the maximization of utility, can equally drive environmental behaviors. Cognitive biases may, for example, contribute to individuals’ persisting battery range concern and limited preference for electric vehicles. Moreover, individuals’ limited familiarity with efficiency units such as kWh / 100 km may obstruct accurate evaluations of energy efficiency and similarly reduce preference for electric vehicles. The present dissertation aimed to address these gaps in the literature. Evidence from four empirical manuscripts supports the importance of motivational as well as cognitive drivers of environmental behavior. Specifically, we found that (1) personal mobility motives predict individuals’ preferences for a wide range of sustainable mobility products, (2) past-framed messaging, similar to conservative party affiliation, leads to the messenger being perceived as more conservative which can increase conservatives' climate policy support under some conditions, (3) individuals underestimate the compatibility of electric vehicles with their driving needs, but a targeted intervention countering this bias increases preference for electric vehicles, (4) using unfamiliar, non-default units reduces value sensitivity in evaluations of vehicle energy consumption, while using the default unit (i.e., a measure of fuel-equivalence) increases value sensitivity and preference for electric vehicles. Taken together, the presented findings highlight that a comprehensive theory of environmental behavior needs to account for both motivational and cognitive influences, and their potential interaction. Finally, the limitations of the present work and its practical implications for the design of behavioural interventions promoting sustainable mobility solutions while accounting for target population heterogeneity are discussed