To promote more sustainable lifestyles, it is vital to understand what motives drive pro-environmental acts among individuals and households. Our proposed project studies one such motive: impure altruism. This is the idea that people contribute to public goods such as the environment not because they care about the goods themselves, but because they care about the act of contributing. For example, they may wish to be seen as pro-social by others.
Theories of impure altruism suggest that, if people are driven by such concerns, traditional environmental policy instruments such as economic incentives or information campaigns may prove ineffective. A more effective approach would be to directly appeal to “impure” motives, such as people’s desire for esteem. Our project is the first comprehensive analysis of impure altruism in the environmental domain.
We will conduct a large-scale randomized controlled field trial in collaboration with the municipality of Halmstad to test whether impure motives can be used to reduce household waste. We reward low-waste households by making their behavior visible to neighbors. Impure altruists who want to put their recycling efforts on display should then respond by strongly reducing their waste. A second study measures the degree of environmental impure altruism among several thousand Swedish citizens. By linking these measures to household-level waste data, we can analyze the role of impure motives in actual pro-environmental behavior.
IFFS is a project partner in this project. The project owner is the University of Gothenburg.
