Over the past few decades, psychological research has yielded a tremendous amount of information regarding how people’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are related to self-awareness, self-representation, self-evaluation, and other processes that involve the self (see Leary and Tangney 2003). This body of theory and research has implications for understanding a wide array of human behavior that is mediated by self-relevant thought, such as deliberate efforts to control or change one’s behaviors or emotions (Baumeister et al. 1998), reactions to other people’s evaluations (Humphrey 1986), and behaviors that involve imagining oneself in other places and times (Leary et al. 2009; Markus and Nurius 1986).

The emergence of self-awareness during human evolution allowed people to imagine themselves in the future and to contemplate the long-term consequences of their present behavior (Leary and Buttermore 2003). The capacity to imagine the future freed human behavior from control by immediate reinforcement and punishment, and allowed people to motivate and sustain actions by imagining desired and undesired future outcomes. For many, perhaps most, desired outcomes, imagining future rewards and punishments can sustain behavior, at least to a degree. However, not all behavior can be easily maintained by imagining future consequences for oneself. In particular, when desired and undesired outcomes are low in direct personal relevance, far in the future, or only weakly linked to one’s present behavior, imagined personal incentives may not be enough to motivate behavior, and this may be particularly true when enacting the desired behavior comes at an immediate cost. Our goal in this article is to examine the self-relevant processes that may be involved in motivating and maintaining behavior under these circumstances.

Throughout our discussion, we use pro-environmental behaviors as a prototypic exemplar of behaviors that have weak or distal consequences and, thus, are not likely to be sustained by their anticipated consequences for the individual. People in industrialized societies engage in an array of activities—such as burning fossil fuels, over-consuming natural resources, and releasing toxic chemicals—that have deleterious effects on plants and animals, including human beings (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007). Given that many environmental problems directly threaten human well-being, one might expect that people would be eager to behave in environmentally responsible ways. However, despite overwhelming evidence that the environment is in jeopardy, many people disregard information about environmental threats and behave in ways that damage the environment (Swim et al. 2009). Furthermore, efforts to increase environmentally-responsible behavior often have limited success (Costanzo et al. 1986; Gardner and Stern 2008).

Much of the difficulty in motivating pro-environmental behaviors lies in the fact that environmental problems are often perceived as distal in both time and location, and the connection between a specific individual’s actions and global problems is usually not obvious. Because the impact of environmental damage is often unseen or obvious only in distant geographical locations, many people perceive environmental threats as having little direct personal relevance. In a cross-national study of environmental beliefs, respondents from 15 of the 18 countries surveyed indicated that environmental outcomes were better in their own country than in other places (Gifford et al. 2009), a belief that undermines people’s environmental concerns and motivation. In addition, the effects of environmental abuse are often uncertain, and people usually believe that truly serious environmental catastrophes lie far in the future. As a result, environmental behaviors are not as strongly affected by self-interest as they would be if the effects were obviously and immediately relevant to people’s well-being. Furthermore, people often perceive that their personal actions have little direct effect on the environment, so that whether they recycle a particular newspaper or turn off the lights on any particular occasion (or, indeed, ever recycle newspapers or turn off the lights) may be seen as inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Given that many people regard environmental problems as not directly relevant to them, perceive serious environmental outcomes as far in the future, and have difficulty seeing how their own behaviors substantially contribute to environmental decline, it is perhaps not surprising that they often do not behave in a pro-environmental manner. However, many people do engage in pro-environmental behavior, even when it is costly and inconvenient, raising the question of what processes motivate and sustain these actions.

The answer, in our view, requires attention to self-processes involving identity, self-evaluation, and self-presentation. We focus on these three processes because they appear to facilitate desirable behavior under conditions in which future consequences are low in direct personal relevance, far in the future, or weakly linked to people’s present behavior. Although we rely on pro-environmental behavior as our ongoing example, the processes that we describe should be relevant for any behavior in which people perceive a weak link between their behaviors and outcomes.

Identity

People’s reactions to events are often mediated by their beliefs about themselves and by the ways that they construe their own identities. As used here, identity refers to how people define or identify themselves in their own minds. People’s identities are composed of many features, including their personal attributes, social roles and relationships, and group memberships. People’s identities differ in the elements that they contain, as well as the importance that they attach to various elements (Cheek 1989). Notably, people’s motives and behaviors are related to the importance that they place on various aspects of their identity so that two otherwise identical individuals may respond quite differently to the same event if their identities differ.

Possessing a particular identity may lead people to engage in actions that have little or no immediate personal consequences via at least four routes. First, identities link individuals with other people and entities as when a man’s identity includes the fact that he is a father, or a woman’s identity includes the fact that she supports animal rights. As a result, people may act to benefit entities that are part of their identities (such as other people, groups, institutions, and objects) even when they personally do not benefit directly. As we discuss momentarily, this effect can be seen quite clearly with respect to identities that are relevant to the environment.

Second, identity and other kinds of self-knowledge provide people with guides to how they should behave. People’s identities provide input into their decisions, especially under conditions of uncertainty. For example, when facing the question of whether to pay more money for an energy-efficient home appliance, a person whose identity includes elements that are relevant to the environment may make the pro-environmental choice for no other reason other than that he or she regards him- or herself as a pro-environmental person. Of course, people without a relevant identity may decide to behave similarly on the basis of calculated reasoning, but identity provides a heuristic for making such decisions.

Third, possessing a relevant identity may lead people to think about their actions at an abstract rather than concrete level. Behaviors may be construed at varying levels of abstraction (Vallacher and Wegner 1987). Concrete, low-level construals specify how an action is performed or the immediate reasons for doing it, whereas high-level construals specify broader reasons for the action. For example, the same action could be construed as grasping an empty paper cup that is lying on the ground, picking up litter, cleaning up the neighborhood, or helping to preserve the environment (with each of these construals being more abstract than the one before it). When actions are construed at a high level of abstraction, they may be performed because of principles or values rather than to achieve specific outcomes. In the environmental domain, as people increasingly view environmental behavior as morally important, they rate disparate environmental behaviors (such as recycling, driving less, and eating vegetarian foods) as more similar to one another and behave more consistently across a range of pro-environmental behaviors (Thøgersen 2004), suggesting that they are construing their actions at a higher level of abstraction. Furthermore, when people are primed to construe situations abstractly (focusing on the big picture of why they perform certain behaviors rather than how they do so), they act in ways that are more likely to sustain the environment in environmental dilemma tasks (Sanna et al. 2009).

Fourth, people experience discomfort when they behave in ways that are inconsistent with their identities. The source of this discomfort has been interpreted in various ways—as a result of motives involving cognitive consistency (Festinger 1957), self-verification (Swann 1983), or maintenance of a consistent public image (Tedeschi et al. 1971)—but theorists agree that perceived inconsistencies between identity and behavior create discomfort and a desire to restore consistency. Thus, people may behave consistently with an established identity to avoid the discomfort of behaving inconsistently rather than because a particular behavior actually matters to them.

Because behaving in an environmentally friendly manner across all domains is very difficult, people may adopt the least difficult path to reduce discrepancies between their pro-environmental identity and anti-environmental behaviors (Diekmann and Preisendörfer 1998). As research on cognitive dissonance shows, people sometimes eliminate inconsistency by changing their attitudes rather than their behavior (Cooper 2007). Studies that made people aware of inconsistencies between their attitudes (caring about the environment and public health) and their behavior (driving alone rather than using public transportation or carpooling) found that, rather than changing their driving to match their attitudes, people emphasized and valued the benefits of driving (such as flexibility and speed of traveling) more highly and placed less value on individual responsibility for the environment (Holland et al. 2002).

People can also maintain identity-behavior consistency by engaging in just enough pro-environmental behaviors to sustain their identity. Bratt (1999) demonstrated a self-justification effect in which people who engage in some pro-environmental behaviors may feel justified in not changing other behaviors that may damage the environment. For example, a person who regularly recycles and turns off lights in empty rooms may feel justified in not using public transportation, or vice versa. Interestingly, the relative environmental impact of the performed and ignored behaviors does not seem to matter very much. People felt that easy and manageable behaviors, such as recycling, justified not changing more difficult and meaningful behaviors such as car use. Not surprisingly, the amount that people justified performing an environmentally unfriendly behavior (such as driving) correlated with how much they already engaged in the behavior (Bratt 1999).

Environmentally-Relevant Identities

Having examined four routes by which identity may mediate actions that have no tangible personal consequences, let us examine the case of environmental identity specifically. Researchers have studied three distinct identities that are relevant to environmental behavior.

Identities That Incorporate the Environment

First, some people’s identities include the natural environment as a prominent feature. Studies using the Environmental Identity Scale (EID; Clayton 2003) have shown that the strength of people’s environmental identity correlates with the value that they place on unity with nature, having a beautiful world, and protecting the environment. Environmental identity is also related to the degree to which people make pro-environmental choices when resolving conflicts that would harm vs. protect the environment and the degree to which people weigh environmental considerations when resolving conflicts that involve environmental issues (Clayton 2003). Environmental identity also correlated with environmental activism (Kempton and Holland 2003). These effects should be interpreted with caution because some items on the EID Scale assess not only the degree to which people incorporate the natural world into their identity but also their tendency to behave in specific environmentally friendly ways (such as donating money to environmental causes, believing that environmentally responsible behavior is moral, and engaging in environmental behaviors more generally) and, thus, scale items assess some of the measured outcomes.

Although not designed as a measure of environmental identity per se, the Allo-inclusive Identity Scale directly measures the degree to which people incorporate aspects of the natural world—both animals and features of nature—into their identities using a variation of the Inclusion of Others in the Self Scale (Leary et al. 2007). The extent to which people include the natural world in their sense of self (Leary et al. 2007) and empathize with non-human animals (Schultz 2000) is related to their level of concern for environmental outcomes for plants and animals. Using scales that measure connectivity to nature and oneness with nature, other research has found that feeling a strong connection to nature is correlated with pro-environmental actions (Davis et al. 2009; Dutcher et al. 2007; Mayer and Frantz 2004).

Much of this work has been informed by spiritual traditions—such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism—that emphasize the interconnections among not only individuals but also the individual and the environment (Bragg 1996; Davis et al. 2009). Within environmental psychology, ideologies that involve “the awareness of the interdependence of life forms … as well as universalism and self-transcendent values” are often called ecological worldviews (Dutcher et al. 2007, p. 477). Proponents of deep ecology—a biocentric philosophy that promotes the intrinsic value of the environment over its instrumental value to human beings—often refer to the “ecological self” that includes all living things, ecosystems, and even inorganic particles of the Earth (Bragg 1996).

Identities That Incorporate Humanity

At the crux of much of the environmental movement is a desire to avoid environmental problems that harm human beings. More than 300,000 people are killed by the consequences of climate change each year, with another 325 million people being seriously affected (Global Humanitarian Forum 2009). Thus, the degree to which people identify with other people—whether people in their community, their nation, or humanity as a whole—should mediate pro-environmental actions. Along these lines, altruistic environmental concern increases when people take the perspective of other people interacting with nature (Schultz 2000). However, altruistic concerns may be harder to arouse when the victims of environmental destruction are geographically distant or culturally different because the likelihood of one person helping another decreases as they view themselves as less similar (Dovidio 1984).

People who incorporate specific other people into their sense of self view benefits to those other individuals as personally beneficial and are more likely to allocate resources to them in a communal fashion (Aron et al. 1992). Accordingly, incorporating other people, whether familiar people or strangers, into one’s identity is associated with prosocial orientations, including kindness and compassion (Leary et al. 2007). Thus, the more that people include humanity as a whole in their identity, the more they should be motivated to reduce environmental harm to others. By the same token, seeing oneself as separate from other people may undermine one’s commitment to behave for the good of the group. Along these lines, pro-environmental attitudes and the degree to which people reported that the environment was important to them correlate positively with collectivism and responsibility to others and negatively with individualism (Clayton 1996, 2003).

Identities That Incorporate Environmental Causes and Groups

Once people identify themselves as belonging to a particular group or conceptualize themselves as being a particular kind of person (thereby belonging to a certain category of people), they tend to incorporate the beliefs, values, and norms of those groups. As a result, the degree to which people incorporate people or groups who endorse particular values into their identity can influence their own values and behavior. For example, people sometimes act in green ways solely because of their identification with a category of people who behave pro-environmentally.

The influence of people’s connections with other people on environmental behavior was demonstrated in a set of studies that examined hotel guests’ willingness to reuse bath towels, a practice that saves water and electricity and releases less laundry detergent into the water supply (Goldstein et al. 2008). By changing the placards that housekeeping staff left in guests’ bathrooms, researchers varied the perceived closeness between the guest and a pro-environmental reference group. Messages that invoked a social norm to reuse towels and used a reference group that seemed more closely related to the guest (other guests who had stayed in the same room) promoted greater towel reuse than messages that focused on the environmental effects of laundering towels or used reference groups that were less closely related to the participant (guests in all rooms). These studies suggest that social norms promote norm-relevant behaviors more strongly when people identify with a reference group that abides by those norms. Thus, efforts to promote pro-environmental norms may fail if people do not see themselves as connected to other people who follow the norm.

Of course, group identification can also promote negative behaviors. When people view themselves as members of a group that has anti-environmental attitudes or behavior, they might be dissuaded from pro-environmental actions (Skogen 2009). Similarly, learning that everyone in a group with which one identifies does bad things to the environment may invoke a social norm to be anti-environmental (Cialdini et al. 2006). Ironically, then, messages that try to encourage pro-environmental behaviors by describing common and widespread environment-damaging behaviors may inadvertently convey that most people engage in eco-unfriendly actions, thus making those actions appear normative.

Self-Evaluation

Beyond the fact that people tend to engage in behaviors that are congruent with their identities, they generally behave in ways that allow them to evaluate themselves positively and feel good about themselves. People’s self-evaluations serve as immediate reinforcement and punishment for behaviors that otherwise may have no hedonic consequences. People compare their actions to relevant standards, and then feel good about themselves when they conform to those standards and bad about themselves when they do not (Carver and Scheier 1982; Higgins 1987).

Once an individual sees him- or herself as the kind of person who behaves in a particular desired way, behaviors relevant to that identity may be sustained by the self-evaluations and emotions that arise when identity-relevant behaviors are performed or even contemplated. Thus, people may behave in a pro-environmental manner to promote positive self-evaluations and to avoid negative self-evaluations, even when their actions have few, if any, tangible implications for them personally. For people who hold standards that discourage environmentally irresponsible behaviors, littering, polluting, failing to recycle, and wasting electricity, gas, and other natural resources presumably affect self-evaluations. Unlike the imagined distal physical consequences of anti-environmental actions, the emotional feedback that such behaviors elicit is both immediate and highly personal.

Violations of Standards

People who hold pro-environmental attitudes, even the most ardent environmentalists, sometimes behave in ways that are detrimental to the environment. Whether such lapses subsequently motivate or undermine future efforts to behave responsibly depends on the attributions that people make for their undesired behaviors and the emotions that they experience. Behavioral attributions—attributing undesired outcomes to temporary lapses, miscalculations, or bad judgment (Janoff-Bulman 1979)—focus on one’s actions and are associated with potentially controllable causes that are fairly specific in scope (“I behaved badly but will do better next time”). In contrast, characterological attributions focus on one’s personal dispositions, such as intelligence, personality, values, and characteristic ways of doing things. Characterological attributions are associated with causes that are often dispositional, habitual, or beyond one’s control and are often more general in scope (e.g., “I always behave badly in this way”). For example, attributing one’s failure to recycle to being too busy involves a behavioral attribution, whereas ascribing such behavior to laziness or irresponsibility involves a characterological attribution.

Whether people explain their undesired actions in terms of temporary behaviors or stable dispositions subsequently influences their self-evaluations, emotions, and behavioral reactions (Anderson et al. 1994; Kaurza and Carey 1984). In particular, making a behavioral attribution for an undesirable action or outcome induces guilt, whereas making a characterological attribution leads to shame (Tangney et al. 2007). Research on self-conscious emotions suggests that behavioral attributions and guilt are adaptive, motivating people to improve themselves or to fix problems that they have created (Tangney and Dearing 2002). In contrast, characterological attributions and shame are associated with failing to improve or to reduce the harm that one has done and with desiring to escape the incriminating situation. Thus, in the context of environmental behavior, behavioral attributions for eco-unfriendly behaviors should be associated with a greater likelihood of enacting green behaviors than characterological attributions.

Although research shows that expecting to experience negative emotions when one does not engage in pro-environmental behavior predicts pro-environmental motives and behaviors (Carrus et al. 2008; Kaiser et al. 2008; Meneses 2009), no studies have distinguished between the effects of guilt and shame. This distinction is important because it has implications for framing effective messages to change undesired behavior, including the adoption of greener lifestyles. For example, making people feel badly about engaging in behaviors that damage the planet might be useful in persuading people to adopt more pro-environmental lifestyles, but messages that convey that “you are a bad person for doing this” may lead to characterological attributions and shame and elicit defensiveness, anger, or withdrawal from environmental efforts (Anderson et al. 1994). Thus, efforts to show people the error of their ways should be structured to evoke behavioral attributions and guilt, which should result in empathy and motivation to remedy the situation and change one’s behavior (Tangney and Dearing 2002). People who feel guilty about whatever damage they do to the environment may be more likely to empathize with the people who might be hurt and more likely to take remedial actions.

Avoiding Recriminating Self-evaluations

Although positive and negative self-evaluations can maintain behaviors that otherwise have no personal consequences, the regulatory function of self-evaluations can be subverted by self-serving tactics that maintain positive self-evaluations artificially. By maintaining positive self-evaluations, such tactics may make people less likely to change negative behaviors.

For example, people may engage in self-serving attributions, explaining undesired behavior in a manner that does not directly implicate them (Bradley 1978). In the environmental domain, people indicate that they have less control over the success of their pro-environmental efforts than their neighbors do (Pieters et al. 1998) and that they have fewer opportunities to engage in eco-friendly behaviors (Van Raiij 2002). Such claims help to insulate self-evaluations from undesired behaviors.

People also sustain positive self-evaluations via the better-than-average effect, comparing themselves to other people in an overly favorable way (Alicke and Govorun 2005). In the environmental realm, people overestimate their own pro-environmental motivations and contributions to environmental protection compared to other members of their community (Diekmann and Preisendörfer 1998; Pieters et al. 1998; Van Raiij 2002). Although the consequences of believing that one is more environmentally-minded than most other people have not been studied, we suspect that believing that one is already better-than-average in environmental responsibility may deter people from engaging in environmental behaviors as fully as they would if they estimated their degree of greenness accurately.

Behaving in environmentally responsible ways is a difficult and often daunting enterprise. Failures along the way are inevitable, especially for people who are just starting to adopt green behaviors. To avoid the negative emotions associated with these failures, people may avoid attempting the behaviors in the first place. For example, people who wish to avoid consuming an over-fished species may find it difficult to keep track of which fish may be eaten in a given month, leading them to occasionally eat certain species at the wrong time. To avoid these mistakes, some people may simply refuse to refer to the guidelines that are available online and in some supermarkets about which fish are most eco-friendly. By doing so, they can blame their failure to eat responsibly on lack of knowledge rather than on indifference.

Self-Presentation

People are at least as concerned with how other people perceive and evaluate them as they are with their own self-views and self-evaluations, if not more so (Leary 1995). Given their concerns with their social images, people may engage in behaviors that otherwise have no benefits for them when those actions lead others to perceive and evaluate them in desired ways. In fact, people will even behave in ways that are potentially harmful to themselves when they think that others will form desired impressions of them (Martin and Leary 1999). Although no research has directly examined how concerns with other people’s impressions influence environmental behaviors, we suspect that self-presentation exerts a strong influence.

Whether people’s concerns with others’ impressions of them promote or deter environmentally friendly behaviors depends, of course, on the kinds of impressions that people believe others will form when they behave, and do not behave, in environmentally friendly ways because the perceived values of an audience influence how people present themselves (Leary and Kowalski 1990). In contexts in which pro-environmental values are viewed favorably, people should be motivated to behave in ways that cultivate an eco-friendly image. However, when other people perceive those who engage in eco-friendly behavior negatively—for example, as obsessive, irrationally fearful of environmental decline, or as a fanatic “tree-hugger”—some people may refrain from doing things that convey support for the environment. For example, some people who heard a U. S. Congressman condemn environmentalists as "tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals" (Hume 2005) may have decided to keep quiet about any environmentally friendly notions they may have held for fear of being similarly labeled.

In part, people assess how others are likely to respond to their behaviors by inferring local norms from other people’s behavior. Thus, when people are exposed to evidence that other people do not value environmental action, such as seeing a park littered with trash, they are less likely to behave in eco-friendly ways (Cialdini et al. 1990). Any cues indicating that other people favor environmentalism and hold positive impressions of those who behave responsibly toward the environment should increase the degree to which people act in eco-friendly ways in order to make a desired impression.

In many ways, performing green behaviors for self-presentational reasons can be seen as a step in the right direction. After all, beneficial actions are beneficial regardless of the person’s reasons for doing them. Moreover, researchers have found evidence of a spillover effect in which people who publicly convey pro-environmental attitudes are subsequently more likely to engage in green behaviors. For example, people who sign a public commitment to recycle are subsequently more likely to do so (DeLeon and Fuqua 1995).

However, the downside of actions that are motivated by self-presentational concerns is that they focus on making a particular impression rather than actually producing desired effects. For example, people can foster a public image of being green by behaving in ways that actually help the environment or by presenting symbolic indicators that they favor environmentalism without enacting behaviors that actually have a notable impact. For example, people may express environmentally sound attitudes or celebrate Earth Day yet not personally engage in pro-environmental actions. Furthermore, when people engage in behaviors primarily to foster desired images in the eyes of those who value environmentalism, they may choose to perform behaviors that maximally convey the appropriate impression at minimum cost and effort to themselves. Not only might they opt to engage in public behaviors that can be witnessed by other people rather than private ones that other people will not see, but they may do things that convey an environmental image but that have little environmental benefit in lieu of private things that actually make a difference.

Conclusions

Many positive behaviors are motivated and sustained either by their immediate consequences or by enlightened self-interest in achieving personally desired goals in the future (such going to college to have a desired career or exercising to remain healthy). However, when outcomes are perceived as having low personal relevance, being far in the future, or weakly linked to one’s present behavior, people are unlikely to perform the requisite behaviors because the consequences of any action are viewed as personally unimportant or inconsequential. In these instances, self-relevant processes can provide reasons and incentives to engage in such behaviors even when they are perceived as having few direct personal consequences. Self-processes involving identity, self-evaluation, and self-presentation provide a bridge between current actions and future outcomes, thus motivating and sustaining behaviors that otherwise might not be enacted.

The role of these processes can be seen clearly in the case of behaviors that protect the environment. From a purely self-focused and hedonistic perspective, people have few reasons to make sacrifices of time, effort, pleasure, or money to prevent environmental problems that they do not believe will directly and noticeably affect them personally for decades, if ever. However, if people incorporate the environment or the people who are being harmed into their identity, evaluate themselves positively or negatively when they behave in eco-friendly versus eco-damaging ways, and value the public image of someone who is concerned about the environment, they should engage in green behaviors.

These self-processes may not be necessary to promote pro-environmental behaviors when sufficient institutional guides and incentives are in place. When governmental regulations and infrastructure either mandate pro-environmental behavior or make it the easiest behavioral option, people tend to behave in green ways regardless of whether they identify with environmentalism (Gardner and Stern 2008; Schultz and Oskamp 1996 ). And, similarly, infrastructural impediments may deter pro-environmental actions even when people would like to be environmentally responsible (Verplanken et al. 2008). However, between these extremes—when opportunities to behave in pro-environmental ways are available but not particularly easy—the performance of environmental behaviors depends on people’s motivations and efforts, which can be sustained by self-relevant processes.