Institute of Environmental Planning, Leibniz University Hannover, Hannover, Germany.
Alexander von Humboldt-Professorship of Environmental Economics, Institute of Environmental Systems Research and Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Osnabrück, Germany.
PLoS One. 2022 Apr 27;17(4):e0266847. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266847. eCollection 2022.
Adolescents are the decision-makers of the future, and as educational research shows, behaviors, habits, and attitudes established at young age strongly shape behavior in adulthood. Therefore, it is important to understand what factors shape young people's climate-relevant behavior. In this study, we examine how information about peer behavior affects adolescents' perception of prevailing social norms and own decision-making. Experimentally, we manipulated whether adolescents received information about other young people's (lack of) support for climate protection, operationalized as a donation to a CO2 offsetting scheme. We find that empirical expectations shifted for all age groups when the information revealed that peers donated nothing or only small amounts. Donation behavior and the normative assessment, however, changed only in the younger age groups. Our study illustrates the caution that must be exercised when others' behavior becomes visible or is deliberatively made salient in order to induce behavioral change, especially among young individuals.
青少年是未来的决策者，正如教育研究表明的那样，年轻时养成的行为、习惯和态度会强烈影响成年后的行为。因此，了解哪些因素塑造了年轻人的与气候相关的行为是很重要的。在这项研究中，我们研究了关于同伴行为的信息如何影响青少年对普遍社会规范的感知和自己的决策。通过实验，我们操纵了青少年是否收到有关其他年轻人（缺乏）支持气候保护的信息，这表现为对 CO2 抵消计划的捐款。我们发现，当信息显示同伴没有捐款或只捐了很少的钱时，所有年龄组的实证预期都发生了变化。然而，捐款行为和规范评估仅在年龄较小的群体中发生了变化。我们的研究说明了在为了诱导行为改变而使他人的行为变得可见或故意突出时必须谨慎行事，尤其是在年轻人中。
