Cleansing Our Recycling Failures: How Guilt and Outrage Lead to Different Types of Pro-Environmental Behavior
type: CreativeWork
description: Most Americans view recycling as “the right thing to do,” yet U.S. recycling rates lag behind other developed countries, and Americans are quick to justify why they do not recycle more (e.g., laziness, inconvenience). Recent messaging has highlighted recycling failures in the U.S., but how effective are these messages, and do they create individual behavioral changes? According to research on moral self-regulation, failing to act morally can threaten a person’s moral self-concept, eliciting moral emotions (i.e., guilt and outrage), and motivating compensatory behavior (such as increased recycling). Three studies examined whether watching a video about poor recycling in the U.S. triggers a moral cleansing process. In all studies, participants first reported the extent to which they thought recycling is a moral issue (i.e., moral imperative ), followed by a video manipulation in which some or all participants watched a video about poor U.S. recycling. After the video manipulation, participants reported their perceptions of moral threat, current emotions, ascriptions of responsibility for causing (i.e., causal responsibility ; CR) and addressing (i.e., moral responsibility ; MR) poor U.S. recycling (Studies 2-3 only), and two measures of recycling intention (i.e., recycling intent , commitment ). In Study 1, half of the participants watched a video about poor U.S. recycling ( video condition ; n = 86) while the other half did not watch the video ( control condition ; n = 94). Participants in the video condition felt more morally threatened, more guilty, and more outraged than those in the control condition. Mean levels of recycling intentions did not differ between conditions; however, path analyses with moral threat mediating the relationship between moral imperative and guilt (or outrage, in separate models), and guilt (or outrage) mediating the relationship between threat and recycling intentions, provided good fit to the data. Furthermore, the indirect path from mo…
abstract: Most Americans view recycling as “the right thing to do,” yet U.S. recycling rates lag behind other developed countries, and Americans are quick to justify why they do not recycle more (e.g., laziness, inconvenience). Recent messaging has highlighted recycling failures in the U.S., but how effective are these messages, and do they create individual behavioral changes? According to research on moral self-regulation, failing to act morally can threaten a person’s moral self-concept, eliciting moral emotions (i.e., guilt and outrage), and motivating compensatory behavior (such as increased recycling). Three studies examined whether watching a video about poor recycling in the U.S. triggers a moral cleansing process. In all studies, participants first reported the extent to which they thought recycling is a moral issue (i.e., moral imperative ), followed by a video manipulation in which some or all participants watched a video about poor U.S. recycling. After the video manipulation, participants reported their perceptions of moral threat, current emotions, ascriptions of responsibility for causing (i.e., causal responsibility ; CR) and addressing (i.e., moral responsibility ; MR) poor U.S. recycling (Studies 2-3 only), and two measures of recycling intention (i.e., recycling intent , commitment ). In Study 1, half of the participants watched a video about poor U.S. recycling ( video condition ; n = 86) while the other half did not watch the video ( control condition ; n = 94). Participants in the video condition felt more morally threatened, more guilty, and more outraged than those in the control condition. Mean levels of recycling intentions did not differ between conditions; however, path analyses with moral threat mediating the relationship between moral imperative and guilt (or outrage, in separate models), and guilt (or outrage) mediating the relationship between threat and recycling intentions, provided good fit to the data. Furthermore, the indirect path from mo…
author: Packard, Cody D.
keywords: Guilt, Moral beliefs, Outrage, Proenvironmental Behavior, Recycling, Psychology, Social Psychology
date published: 2025-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:41:09Z
provider: Claremont Graduate University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Claremont Graduate University