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