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 responsibility feelings as a predictor is that people can feel either morally or conventionally responsible. Moral responsibility feelings depend on a person's self-ascribed responsibility (i.e. a deliberate responsibility judgement) and guilt feelings. Conventional responsibility feelings depend on the social expectations a person is aware of and his or her readiness to fulfill these expectations. In a survey study of 445 members of two Swiss transportation associations, the relative influence of these distinguishable responsibility concepts on ecological behaviour was assessed. Structural equation analyses revealed that people apparently feel morally responsible rather than conventionally responsible for the environment. Guilt feelings explain 44 per cent of the variance of these responsibility feelings, which, in turn, explain 45 per cent of the variance of a person's deliberately made responsibility judgement, which, in turn, predicts 55 per cent of the variance of a person's ecological behaviour. These results suggest 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-ascription of responsibility and it is this judgement that predicts a considerable portion of a person's ecological behaviour. (C) 1999 Academic Press.