Big Five and HEXACO Personality Traits, pro-environmental attitudes, and behaviors: A meta-analysis

Alistair Soutter, Timothy Bates, Rene Mottus

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

With climate change and its consequences believed to be among the most vital challenges for humanity and the Earth’s ecosystem, it is important to understand why individuals (do not) adopt pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Personality traits are well suited for this purpose. Because no recent work has systematically combined the accumulating evidence on this topic, we aimed to meta-analyze the associations of the Big Five and HEXACO personality domains with pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Meta-analysis of 38 sources (N = 44,993) implicated Openness and Honesty-Humility as the strongest correlates of pro-environmental attitudes (r = .22 and .20) and behaviors (r = .21 and .25). Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and to a lesser extent Extraversion, were also associated with pro-environmental attitudes (r = .15, .12, and .09) and behaviors (r = .10, .11, and .10). Heterogeneity among effect sizes was partly explained by samples’ gender ratio, age, and country of origin, and by personality model. P-curve analysis, funnel plots, and Egger’s tests indicated significant, but sporadic and small publication bias. As a validity test, the meta-analytic associations collectively provided substantial predictive accuracy for pro-environmental attitudes (r = .44 to .45) and behaviors (r = .28 to .43) in independent hold-out samples.
Original languageEnglish
JournalPerspectives on Psychological Science
Early online date8 May 2020
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 8 May 2020

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Big Five
  • HEXACO
  • environment
  • attitude
  • behavior

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Big Five and HEXACO Personality Traits, pro-environmental attitudes, and behaviors: A meta-analysis'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this