The Tree Task: An Incentivized, One-Shot Decision Task to Measure Pro-Environmental Behavior

Essl, Andrea; Hauser, David; Suter, Manuel; Bieberstein, Frauke von

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4513825

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…With regards to the former, the strength of relationships observed in relation to hypothesis 3 can be viewed as consistent with those reported for other behavioral measures and various self-report measures of pro-environmental behavior (Berger & Wyss, 2021;Essl et al, 2023;Krebs et al, 2023;Lange et al, 2018;Lange & Dewitte, 2021), and for the latter it will be of value to explore how performance on the ECT relates to performance on other measures in future research.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 61%

“…For example, experimental paradigms have been developed where financial costs are used to indicate participants' pro-environmental behavior. These include the Greater Goods Game (Klein et al, 2017), which is based on a public goods game which also includes options to donate money to an environmental charity, the Tree Task (Essl et al, 2023) where THE EMAIL CONSERVATION TASK participants can choose to invest money towards planting a tree, and the Carbon Emission Task (Berger & Wyss, 2021) where participants can choose to invest money towards buying carbon offset vouchers. In these studies, participants who choose not to donate money to the pro-environmental outcomes will instead keep the money themselves.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Email Conservation Task: Testing the validity of an online measure of direct pro-environmental behavior

Farrelly,

Bhogal,

Badham

2024

Preprint

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There is a need for valid measures of pro-environmental behavior, in particular ones measuring actual behavior. In response, a number of such measures have been introduced recently, however each faces limitations such as high costs, practical use and/or only measure indirect environmental behavior, limiting their scope, accessibility and inclusivity. In response, this study introduces the easily administered and low cost Email Conservation Task (ECT), which measures direct pro-environmental behaviour (in this case, email use). Here, participants chose between personal costs (time spent on trivial tasks) or environmental costs (receiving unnecessary emails leading to CO2 emissions) across multiple trials. In a pre-registered study testing the validity of the ECT, it was found (as hypothesized) that participants scored higher on the ECT (incurred more personal costs rather than receiving unnecessary emails) when personal costs to them were lower, and also scored higher when the environmental costs of receiving unnecessary emails were higher. Finally, total scores on the ECT significantly correlated with scores on three self-reported indicators pro-environmentalism. Overall the results of this study support all three hypotheses, indicating that the ECT is a valid measure of pro-environmental behavior that can be implemented across a diverse range of research areas.

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