Pro-Environmental Behavior and Rational Consumer Choice

Pro-Environmental Behavior and Rational Consumer Choice 18
having elementary education vs. having no education and amounts to almost two thirds of
the coefficient of being employed vs. being unemployed. According to regression B,
recycling is also positively and significantly associated with greater life satisfaction, the
coefficient being somewhat smaller than in regression A. An almost identical result holds
with respect to water conservation (regression C). When the three pro-environment
behaviors are included jointly (regression D), the associated coefficients become smaller.
This is to be expected, given the correlations between these behaviors (see Table B3).
However, in spite of these correlations, all three coefficients remain highly significant.
Table 1 also shows that people are more satisfied when the respective behaviors are more
widespread in their societies (variable QSoc) 19 , probably indicating the utility from better
environmental quality.
These results suggest that, controlling for nationality, time and the spread of proenvironmental
behaviors as well as individual socio-economic characteristics, an
individual is better off when displaying pro-environment consumption behavior.
Alternatively, however, these results may arise because people with pro-environment
attitudes – which trigger these behaviors – are more satisfied per se. This possibility is
being checked in the regressions presented in Table 2. These regressions, A’ - D’, are
similar to regressions A – D in Table 1 but include indicators of pro-environment attitudes
(EnvPriority, WTP20) in addition to pro-environment behaviors. It can be seen that these
attitudes are in fact significantly associated with greater life satisfaction. Nevertheless, the
coefficients of the behaviors remain positive and significant. They are, however, of a
smaller size than in their counterparts A – D, especially in the case of water conservation.
19 In regression D, QSoc is the average across the three behaviors.