Examinations of the interactions of two people affecting environmental behaviors: A study of dyadic data

Abstract

This study investigated the processes through which environmental behaviors are disseminated via interactions with friends. Specifically, the effects of friends’ environmental behaviors and conversations with friends on environmental behavior were examined by estimating behavior and subjective norms. In this study, dyadic data collected from pairs of university students and their friends were analyzed. The Actor-Partner Interdependence Model for interchangeable data was used for the analysis. As a result, it was shown that conversations with friends directly affected the subjects’ environmental behaviors, as did the estimation of friends’ behavior and subjective norms for both individual and collective environmental behaviors. Thus, it was demonstrated that friends can affect each other’s environmental behaviors through conversations and the estimation of each other’s behavior. However, these behaviors did not impact on the behavior of others unless they were noticed by others, which suggests the importance of demonstrating such behaviors publically. Our findings showed that it is useful to increase opportunities for environmental conversations with others to promote environmental behaviors.