Powerful Others, Chance or Fate: How Perceptions of Enablers and Constraints Mediate External Environmental Locus-of-Control Effects on Proenvironmental Behaviors: An Abstract

Abstract

Since environmental degradation principally ensues from human activities, reversing its progression lies with altering consumer behaviors. Environmental concern and improved awareness about pro-environmental initiatives is essential but insufficient for generating enduring behavioral shifts. Beyond pecuniary and product performance concerns, unless consumers hold a sense of empowerment and responsibility for achieving green outcomes, “…green ‘creeds’ are unlikely to translate into green ‘deeds’” (Cleveland et al. 2012, p. 210). We submit that consumer’s propensity to undertake proenvironmental behaviors (PEBs) is also helped or hindered by beliefs stemming in part, from situational cues that respectively encourage or thwart the enactment of PEBs. Building upon the concept of Environmental Locus of Control (ELOC)—which refers to a person’s personal efficacy and responsibility to change the environment (Cleveland and Kalamas 2015)—this research examines the intervening roles played by consumers’ perceptions of enabling and constraining contextual factors, in mediating the relationships between the two broad loci of external ELOC (“powerful others”, and “chance or fate”) and PEBs. These enabling and constraining factors are classified along a continuum of objectivity vs. subjectivity (i.e., real vs. perceived), and we investigate how these constructs independently and jointly (i.e., by mediating the predictive ability of external ELOC) affect PEBs. With two studies (n1 = 670 students, n2 = 310 mainstream adult consumers), we examined the construct validity of our psychometric and behavioral measures, and using Hayes’ PROCESS macro, tested our hypothesized model. The results largely corroborated the mediating role of environmental constraints and enablers in explaining the role between external ELOC and PEBs. These mediating factors provide an important missing piece to help bridge the proenvironmental attitude-behavior gap. The task facing marketers and public policy makers is not just to understand consumers’ environmental dispositions and ascriptions of responsibility for achieving environmental goals, but moreover, to (re)engineering the context to enhance the pre-eminence of enablers (ease of being green, availability/quality of eco-options, etc.) and curtail the implied presence of hindrances (cost, effort required, quality trade-offs, etc.).