Climate change mitigation: A question of humanitarian or environmental motivation?

Addressing climate change at the individual level and the associated conflict between self-interest and the common good is viewed primarily as a motivational challenge in the environmental domain. However, due to this conflict, climate change mitigation has also been framed as a classical social dilemma that requires direct, overt cooperation with other people. Thus, there seems to be a lack of clarity in the extents to which climate change mitigation depends on humanitarian-prosocial motivation or environmental motivation. This study investigates the extents to which individual climate change mitigation is driven by humanitarian and environmental motivation – two motivations that are rooted in an inherent human prosocial propensity that stems from a combination of our genetic makeup and our established culture of prosocial behavior. We conducted a laboratory experiment using an adapted Public Goods Game in an environmental context with N = 201 participants. We found that both humanitarian and environmental motivation positively predicted pro-environmental choices in the Public Goods Game, with humanitarian motivation as the stronger predictor. On a theoretical level, these results suggest that environmentally positive behaviors that demand significant cooperation could be more accurately understood as both humanitarian-prosocial behaviors and pro-environmental actions. On a practical level, interventions should be tailored to the required level of cooperation, for instance, through framing or by promoting a sense of connectedness with either fellow humans or nature.