Responsibility as a predictor of ecological behaviour

How responsible a person feels for the environment is a promising predictor of that person's ecological behaviour. One difficulty of using responsibil ity feelings as a predictor is that people can feel either morally or conve ntionally responsible. Moral responsibility feelings depend on a person's s elf-ascribed responsibility (i.e. a deliberate responsibility judgement) an d guilt feelings. Conventional responsibility feelings depend on the social expectations a person is aware of and his or her readiness to fulfill thes e expectations. In a survey study of 445 members of two Swiss transportatio n associations, the relative influence of these distinguishable responsibil ity concepts on ecological behaviour was assessed. Structural equation analyses revealed that people apparently feel morally r esponsible rather than conventionally responsible for the environment. Guil t feelings explain 44 per cent of the variance of these responsibility feel ings, which, in turn, explain 45 per cent of the variance of a person's del iberately made responsibility judgement, which, in turn, predicts 55 per ce nt of the variance of a person's ecological behaviour. These results sugges t that if people feel guilty for what they do or fail to do, they also feel morally responsible for the environment. This promotes their self-ascripti on of responsibility and it is this judgement that predicts a considerable portion of a person's ecological behaviour. (C) 1999 Academic Press.