Campus prosociality as a sustainability indicator

Abstract

Purpose Prosociality may in part determine sustainability behavior. Prior research indicates that pro-environmental behavior correlates with prosocial attitudes, and separately, that prosociality correlates with social support in homes and communities. Therefore, prosociality may constitute a keystone variable linking human well-being with pro-environmental behavior. The purpose of the paper is to test this conjecture. Design/methodology/approach Data from a multi-year student survey at the University of Maine on environmental behavior, prosociality and experienced social support are used. A two-stage least-squares regression is applied to explore the relationships between these variables, and sub-scale analysis of the pro-environmental responses is performed. Additionally, spatial statistics for the student population across the state are computed. Findings The data corroborate previous findings and indicates that social support within a community may bolster the prosociality of its members, which in turn may increase pro-environmental behaviors and intentions. Research limitations/implications Cross-sectional data do not permit the imputation of causality. Self-reported measures of behavior may also be biased. However, student prosociality surveys may provide an effective and low-cost sustainability metric for large populations. Social implications The results of this study corroborate prior research to suggest that pro-environmental and prosocial behaviors may both be enhanced by bolstering social support efforts at the community level. Originality/value It is suggested that prosociality could become a keystone sustainability indicator. The study’s results extend the understanding of the connections between prosociality, social support and pro-environmental behavior. The results of this study suggest that efforts to simultaneously improve the well-being and environmental status might focus on building prosociality and social support systems at the community level.

Cultural Variation in the Development of Beliefs About Conservation

“…This finding suggests that cultural institutions may serve different functions in different contexts; whereas conservation beliefs seem to be unrelated to religious justifications in the United States, religion in Vanuatu may support conservation. This result is consistent with the proposal that religious beliefs are culturally transmitted because they solve adaptive problems (Henrich & Henrich, 2007; Norenzayan & Gervais, 2012) and is exemplary of the way solutions to issues of resource depletion can become integrated into cultural rules and institutions (Johannes, 2002; Turner & Berkes, 2006; Waring, Sullivan, & Stapp, 2016). Future research should continue to examine nuanced ways in which particular religious beliefs support or hinder conservation.…”

Cooperatives exhibit greater cooperation than comparable businesses: experimental evidence

“…Most research on human cooperation in the last few decades has focused establishing the theoretical possibility of cooperation and altruism (Nowak, 2006), demonstrating that humans do, in fact, have prosocial and cooperative tendencies (Rand and Nowak, 2013), comparing human prosociality between cultures (Henrich et al, 2010(Henrich et al, , 2004, or with other species including ants and termites. Very little research has used human cooperation to understand organizational relationships and dynamics (but see Waring et al, 2016Waring et al, , 2014. Following the research on evolution of human cooperation (Henrich, 2015), we suggest that all organizations rely on cooperation of their constituents in some domains to some extent.…”

Do pro-social students care more for the environment?

“…Cooperative behavior is the key for resolving these ‘social dilemmas’ where individually costly actions generate a better outcome for the collective group (see, for example, Ostrom 1990; Komorita and Parks, 1994; Weber et al , 2004; Poteete et al , 2010). Therefore, based on the binding trait of cooperation, pro-social and pro-environment behavior or attitudes are expected to be positively related and empirical evidence corroborates this conjecture (Kaiser and Byrka, 2011; Waring et al , 2016; Neaman et al , 2018). The term pro-social refers to an individual’s attitude or behavior that benefits other humans (Schroeder and Graziano, 2015), and pro-environment attitude or behavior is for the benefit of the environment, which implies that the beneficiaries include both humans and non-humans (Nolan and Schultz, 2015).…”

“…Social support refers to a socially conducive environment that an individual receives which is facilitated by members of the local community like family, friends, neighbors, university etc. Social support has been shown to enhance pro-social behavior (Waring et al , 2016; Guo, 2017) and social exclusion has been shown to hamper pro-social behavior (Twenge et al , 2007). Therefore, social support is expected to be positively associated with pro-social attitude or behavior, and pro-social attitude or behavior, in turn, is expected to be positively associated with a pro-environment attitude or behavior.…”

“…Therefore, social support is expected to be positively associated with pro-social attitude or behavior, and pro-social attitude or behavior, in turn, is expected to be positively associated with a pro-environment attitude or behavior. This sequential relationship between social support, pro-social behavior, and pro-environment behavior are posited in a conceptual framework by Waring et al (2016). Based on the rationale of Waring et al ’s (2016) conceptual framework, in this study social support is interpreted as an instrumental variable to identify pro-social attitude for estimating the relationship between pro-environment and pro-social attitudes, where pro-social attitude is an endogenous explanatory variable for pro-environment attitude due to a plausible bi-directional relationship between the two.…”