New Ways to Promote Proenvironmental Behavior: Expanding and Evaluating Motives for Environmentally Responsible Behavior

This article contends that while striving to promote environmentally responsible behavior, we have focused attention too narrowly on just two classes of motives. There is a need to expand the range of motives available to practitioners and to provide a framework within which motives can be evaluated for both their immediate and long-term effectiveness. The article then examines a strategy for promoting environmentally responsible behavior that has significant potential. This strategy is based on a particular form of motivation called intrinsic satisfaction. Nine studies are reviewed that have outlined the structure of intrinsic satisfaction. A key theme discussed is the human inclination for competence. This fundamental human concern is shown to have both a general form and a resource-specific version. Although the search for motives effective at promoting environmentally responsible behavior (ERB) is being enthusiastically pursued, the work so far has been somewhat confined. The vast majority of attention has been given to only two motivations: providing material incentives and disincentives sufficient to make the behavior worth attending to and focusing on the altruistic reasons for engaging in the behavior. There has been relatively little exploration of other, potentially more useful alternatives. Early attention was given to the use of incentives and disincentives. Scott Geller and his colleagues explored the effectiveness of incentives and disincentives in promoting ERB and established that such behavior can be motivated by the manipulation of material reward, whether token or real (Geller, 1987, 1992; Geller