Reducing the gap between pro‐environmental disposition and behavior: The role of feeling power

Environmental issues are some of the most pressing threats the world is facing nowadays. In this context, motivating individual pro‐environmental behavior becomes highly relevant. One strategy is to harness people's pro‐environmental dispositions (e.g., biospheric values, pro‐environmental attitudes). Although acknowledging the need to behave pro‐environmentally lies at the core of these dispositions, the extent to which they are reflected in day‐to‐day pro‐environmental practices fluctuates to a great extent. How to bridge this gap between dispositions and behaviors in pro‐environmentalism? This research tests a novel psychological solution, that is, to heighten subjective feelings of power. Power depicts people's control over their own and others’ outcomes. Two studies (total N  = 338, with n  = 200 in Study 1 and n  = 138 in Study 2) manipulated people's situational sense of high versus low power (by recalling and writing about relevant incidents), measured pro‐environmental dispositions (biospheric values in Studies 1 and 2; attitude toward a specific environmental cause in Study 2), and examined their effects on pro‐environmental behaviors (spending time on environmental persuasion in Study 1 and spending money on environmental donation in Study 2). Overall, both studies revealed that pro‐environmental dispositions predicted pro‐environmental behaviors, but only when the actors were prompted to experience a high instead of a low sense of power. The findings illuminate power as an important and viable communication tactic—to orient people toward their dispositions and practice what they preach in pro‐environmentalism.