Environmental agency, moral reasoning, and moral disengagement in adults

Abstract

ABSTRACTTo assess the relationships between environmental agency, prosocial moral reasoning, and civic moral disengagement, 544 community-dwelling adults were administered the image-based Environmental Agency Scale (EAS), the Prosocial Moral Reasoning Objective Measure (PROM), and the Civic Moral Disengagement Scale (CMDS). The EAS Agentic Self and Agentic Other dimensions proved to be reliable measures and showed adequate factor validity. Mean/median score comparisons between EAS Agentic Self Scale and Agentic Other Scale scores indicated that participants viewed society-level actions as more relevant than individual-level actions when environment defense is at issue. Partial correlation analysis results showed that environmental agentic self was grounded in individual differences in prosocial moral reasoning. Civic moral disengagement yielded negative associations with EAS Agentic Other Scale scores, providing further support to the relevance of moral disengagement process in environmental sensitivity. These results may improve our understanding of environmental agency and its connections with prosocial moral reasoning and moral disengagement.KEYWORDS: Climate changeself-agencyother-agencyimage-based taskprosocial moral reasoningmoral disengagement AcknowledgmentsThe authors wish to thank Alice Barchi for her help in collecting data.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Supplementary materialSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10508422.2023.2267705Data availability statementThe data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author.