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Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-eab-10.1177_00139165231163547 for Pro-Environmental Behavior Triggers Moral Inference, Not Licensing by Observers by Jan Urban, Štěpán Bahník and Markéta Braun Kohlová in Environment and Behavior

This study will aim to replicate finding from Study 2 from Bastian et al. (2012) that motivated-cognition processes make people rate the mental capacities of animals (lambs and cows) as comparatively lower when they learn that these animals are bred for human consumption and will be slaughtered. Besides directly replicating Study 2 from Bastian et al., 2012, we also aim to extend this study by testing whether the effect of motivated cognition is moderated by meat-eating; we expect that motivated-cognition effect should be stronger in persons who eat meat. References Bastian, B., Loughnan, S., Haslam, N., & Radke, H. R. M. (2012). Don’t Mind Meat? The Denial of Mind to Animals Used for Human Consumption. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(2), 247–256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167211424291

We test the effect of social class on the yielding of drivers to pedestrians in a pedestrian crossing. We conceptually replicate Piff et al. (2012).

This study aims to conduct direct replication of Mazar and Zhong’s (2010, experiment 3) moral licensing experiment and extend it by including environmental attitude as a moderator of moral regulation processes and by including a control group.

Methods and Measures

Analysis plan

Hypotheses and Expectations

Conceptual replication of Mazar and Zhong’s (2010) experiment on moral licensing (Experiment 3) with a control group, environmental attitude as moderator of moral processes and die casting task as DV.

This is a R script used to process the data from dots task and test the hypotheses.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the 2020 lockdown related to COVID-19 affected the environmental motivation of individuals and the role this motivation plays in everyday decision-making and in the choice of delivery options for products bought over the Internet. We are interested in whether the lockdown reduced the frequency of proenvironmental behaviors and whether it decreased the probability of choosing environmentally friendly delivery options. In addition, we explore whether some of the following explanations can account for the expected drop in the frequency of proenvironmental behaviors and drop in probability choice of environmentally friendly delivery option: 1. higher behavioral costs of ecological behavior; 2. lower levels of environmental attitude; 3. lower weight of environmental attitude as a factor of environmental behavior. These three explanations are not mutually exclusive but have different implications. Explanation 1 (higher behavioral costs of environmental behavior) can be expected during the lockdown situation because many everyday activities become more difficult. As a result of higher behavioral costs, ecological behaviors become less frequent, even though environmental attitude levels of individuals remain unchanged (for theoretical argument, see, e.g., Kaiser et al., 2010; Kaiser & Wilson, 2004). If this explanation holds, we should expect individuals to make the same choices with respect to ecological behaviors as they did before the lockdown once they face similar behavioral costs as before the lockdown. Explanation 2 (lower environmental attitude levels) can be expected based on the notion that COVID-19 crisis might have led people to rethink their priorities and downgrade their behavioral goal of environmental conservation. If people downgraded the goal of environmental protection as their personal goal, they would be less likely to make environmentally friendly choices even when facing the same behavioral costs as before the COVID-19 lockdown (for theoretical argument, see, e.g., Kaiser et al., 2010; Kaiser & Wilson, 2004). Importantly, this explanation assumes that only the average attitude level in certain population drops but the weight of environmental attitude in the decision-making should remain the same as before the lockdown. Finally, explanation 3 (lower weight of environmental attitude) can be expected based on previous findings that heightened external constraints can attenuate the effect of environmental attitude on environmental behavior (e.g., Black, Stern, & Elworth, 1985; Diekmann & Preisendörfer, 2003). More specifically, we are interested in whether the COVID-19 lockdown attenuates the effect of environmental attitude on decision-making in otherwise similar decision situation as before the lockdown. Such attenuation can be driven, for instance, by various risk-compensation mechanisms whereby focus on minimization of one risk (e.g., COVID-related risks) leads to negligence of other risks (e.g., risks of ecological degradation; for related evidence, see Bolton et al., 2006; Dilley et al., 1997; Peltzman, 1975), or by other compensation mechanisms, such as moral licensing (e.g., Mullen & Monin, 2016) or single-action bias (e.g., Weber, 1997), whereby a focus on one set of socially desirable actions (e.g., protective behaviors against COVID-19) can perhaps lead to a neglect of other socially desirable actions (e.g., environmental protection). This explanation would mean that the weight of environmental attitude in decision-making would drop and, as a result of that, probability of specific environmental behavior would drop as well even if the average levels of environmental attitude in the population and behavioral costs of that behavior remain the same as before the lockdown.

The purpose of this study is to replicate and extend the results of the previous study (https://osf.io/tn28x/?view_only=3b307759e1be4979b567aae9f5747717) that focused on whether COVID-19-related restrictions affected people’s environmental motivation and their pro-environmental behavior. More specifically, the purpose of the current study is to replicate the following findings of the original study: (i) COVID-related restrictions did not have a uniform effect on engagement in pro-environmental behaviors; (ii) COVID-related restrictions did not have a uniform effect on behavioral costs of pro-environmental behaviors; (iii) COVID-related restrictions increased perceived behavioral costs of online shopping (delivery time, availability of products, overall difficulty of making the purchase). (iv) COVID-related restrictions did not change preference for environmentally friendly delivery of goods bought online; (v) COVID-related restrictions decreased the weight of environmental attitude as a factor of choice of environmentally friendly delivery options; (vi) COVID-related restrictions increased the weight of delivery time as a factor of choice of delivery options; (vii) COVID-related restrictions did not affect the weight of delivery price as a factor of choice of delivery options. Prior to the current study, we conducted another study using data collected before COVID-related restrictions were introduced (Sample 1, February 19-March 6, 2020) and after they were introduced (Sample 2, April 10-May 11, 2020, respectively); all participants of S2 were in s1, but identifiers of individuals that would link data from S1 and S2 were not available (datasets and materials available here: https://osf.io/tn28x/?view_only=3b307759e1be4979b567aae9f5747717). The current study uses data collected at the time when COVID restrictions were relaxed (Sample 3, September 2-October 3, 2020) and then re-introduced (Sample 4, November 20-December 30, 2020); same participants took place in S3 and S4 and the datasets are linked using identifiers of individual participants.