Large-scale environmental crises are genuinely collective phenomena: they usually result from collective, rather than personal, behavior and how they are cognitively represented and appraised is determined by collectively shared interpretations (e.g., differing across ideological groups) and based on concern for collectives (e.g., humankind, future generations) rather than for individuals. Nevertheless, pro-environmental action has been primarily investigated as a personal decision-making process. We complement this research with a social identity perspective on pro-environmental action. Social identity is the human capacity to define the self in terms of "We" instead of "I," enabling people to think and act as collectives, which should be crucial given personal insufficiency to appraise and effectively respond to environmental crises. We propose a Social Identity Model of Pro-Environmental Action (SIMPEA) of how social identity processes affect both appraisal of and behavioral responses to large-scale environmental crises. We review related and pertinent research providing initial evidence for the role of 4 social identity processes hypothesized in SIMPEA. Specifically, we propose that ingroup identification, ingroup norms and goals, and collective efficacy determine environmental appraisals as well as both private and public sphere environmental action. These processes are driven by personal and collective emotions and motivations that arise from environmental appraisal and operate on both a deliberate and automatic processing level. Finally, we discuss SIMPEA's implications for the research agenda in environmental and social psychology and for interventions fostering pro-environmental action. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Recent policy changes highlight the need for citizens to take adaptive actions to reduce flood-related impacts. Here, we argue that these changes represent a wider behavioral turn in flood risk management (FRM). The behavioral turn is based on three fundamental assumptions: first, that the motivations of citizens to take adaptive actions can be well understood so that these motivations can be targeted in the practice of FRM; second, that private adaptive measures and actions are effective in reducing flood risk; and third, that individuals have the capacities to implement such measures. We assess the extent to which the assumptions can be supported by empirical evidence. We do this by engaging with three intellectual catchments. We turn to research by psychologists and other behavioral scientists which focus on the sociopsychological factors which influence individual motivations (Assumption 1). We engage with economists, engineers, and quantitative risk analysts who explore the extent to which individuals can reduce flood related impacts by quantifying the effectiveness and efficiency of household-level adaptive measures (Assumption 2). We converse with human geographers and sociologists who explore the types of capacities households require to adapt to and cope with threatening events

Recent research provides evidence that group norms influence intentions to engage in pro‐climate behaviour and that identification with the group moderates the norm effects. However, past studies have neglected to examine if the effects on norm adherence vary among different identification aspects. The present studies close this gap by investigating group‐level self‐investment (i.e. the importance of and satisfaction with the group) and self‐definition (i.e. perceived similarities among group members) as possible moderators of group norm effects. We used two experimental studies to test our assumption that self‐investment but not self‐definition would moderate the norm‐intention relation. The results support our assumption and show that group members who were highly self‐invested in the group (but did not necessarily perceive themselves as similar to other group members) adhered more strongly to climate‐related ingroup norms than less self‐invested group members. However, perceived similarity among group members (i.e. self‐definition) did not positively contribute to respondents' decision to conform to a group norm. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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