Exploring the association between climate change concern and mitigation behaviour between societies: A person-context interaction approach

Abstract

Despite the global scale of climate change, research comparing people’s behavioural expression of their concern for the problem across societies is lacking. The present investigation adopts a person-context interaction approach to provide such a comparison and demonstrates the influences of societal-level factors. We propose that some sociocultural contexts tend to be more agentic, allowing people to express their internal attributes, including climate change concern, whereas some contexts tend to be more restrictive, hindering people from doing so. With two international datasets, we observed that the association between climate change concern and mitigation behaviour was stronger among societies with higher levels of self-expression affordance (indicated by lower levels of disease threat and higher levels of governance quality, economic development, and individualism). These results indicate the importance of considering not only individual-level determinants but also societal-level factors in the study of people’s behavioural response to climate change. They also offer insights into how environmental practitioners and decision makers can promote mitigation behaviour.