Predicting and Promoting Adolescents’ Pro-Environmental Behavior in Different Big Five Trait Clusters

Abstract

The dissertation investigates youth’s pro-environmental behaviors through a holistic personoriented perspective and adopts evolutionary psychology as a unifying metatheory for understanding and explaining behavior. The aim of the dissertation is to investigate how predictive models of pro-environmental behavior function in different groups of individuals clustered by their personality traits and how evolutionarily tailored persuasive normative stimuli affect individuals in these groups. The dissertation concludes that: the classical model of the Theory of Planned Behavior functions sufficiently well without additional expansions; individuals with different patterns of Big Five personality traits form beliefs about pro-environmental behaviors differently and therefore predictive models function differently for these clusters as well; evolutionarily tailored normative stimuli are effective in promoting pro-environmental intentions, but their effectiveness is different for individuals with different patterns of Big Five personality traits; conventional correlational approaches are not sufficient enough to fully understand the role of innate traits in pro-environmental behavior because traits do not function independently of one another.