Frontrunners for the future: Understanding and promoting adolescents’ pro-environmental engagement

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If we want to secure a habitable planet for young generations, we must rapidly and extensively change our behavior. While this is a great challenge, this dissertation shows that, from a young age, people are motivated to adopt pro-environmental behaviors when they perceive such efforts as aligned with their personal motives. Climate change communication that resonates with adolescents’ key developmental motives to establish autonomy and gain peer status motivates them to adopt pro-environmental behaviors. The first aim of this dissertation was to better understand adolescents’ pro-environmental engagement. In Chapter 2, my colleagues and I pooled data of 23,981 adolescents to test differences in environmental attitudes across age and historical time. In this meta-analysis, we found that age trends in environmental attitudes are contingent upon how these attitudes are conceptualized: while cognitive aspects of environmental attitudes may gradually increase from childhood into emerging adulthood, affective and behavioral aspects may decrease until late adolescence. We also found relative stability in mean levels of environmental attitudes over the past two decades. In Chapter 3, I interviewed Dutch climate activists and found that adolescents’ climate activism is intertwined with their developmentally salient motives to contribute, establish autonomy, explore and express their identity, and connect to others (even though they also experienced friction with some people due to their activist engagement). In Chapter 4, we meta-analyzed 169 studies from the past five decades that tested the effectiveness of environmental education programs for youth. Overall, environmental education significantly improved students’ environmental knowledge, attitudes, intentions, and behavior. The second aim of this dissertation was to test a novel motive-alignment approach to promoting adolescents’ pro-environmental engagement. Across four randomized experiments, my colleagues and I tested whether proof-of-concept interventions that harness—rather than ignore or work against—adolescents’ autonomy (Chapters 5, 6, 8) and peer status (Chapter 7) motives can promote their behavioral (Chapters 5-7) and emotional (Chapter 8) pro-environmental engagement. As such, this dissertation offers a novel approach to promoting adolescent behavior change in the context of climate change. First, we found that merely providing adolescents with information on climate change and its mitigation was already effective to promote adolescents’ pro-environmental behavior (Chapter 7). Second, our experiments suggest that motive-alignment is a promising approach to boost the effectiveness of informational approaches to promoting adolescent pro-environmental engagement: Compared to an intervention that provided information alone, an autonomy-aligned intervention increased adolescents’ pro-environmental intentions and petitioning behavior (Chapter 5), and peer status-aligned interventions increased adolescents’ intended and actual pro-environmental food choices (Chapter 7). We also found that autonomy-aligned interventions generally elicited more positive and activating emotions (e.g., hope) while reducing negative and deactivating emotions (e.g., hopelessness; Chapter 8). Together, the research presented in these chapters demonstrates that educational interventions can promote adolescents’ pro-environmental engagement when they provide tailored information, and that their effectiveness can be boosted via motive-alignment techniques that frame pro-environmental engagement as relevant to adolescents’ motives to acquire autonomy and peer status. Importantly, our evidence also suggests that the effects of motive-alignment techniques vary across contexts and behaviors.

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