The effect of proenvironmental motivation on the choice of transport during COVID-19 lockdown (follow up study, preregistration)

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.