Cleansing Our Recycling Failures: How Guilt and Outrage Lead to Different Types of Pro-Environmental Behavior
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 moral imperative to recycling intentions, through moral threat and guilt (or outrage), was significant only in the video condition, suggesting that a moral cleansing process may have been occurring in the video condition, but not necessarily in the control condition. Study 2 tested whether attributing responsibility for poor recycling in the U.S. to different actors was associated with distinct moral cleansing patterns. Participants watched one of three recycling videos: self-focused (blaming individual consumers), other-focused (blaming third parties and other institutions; e.g., “local governments” “waste collectors”), or neutral (i.e., the same video in Study 1). Participants in the self-focused condition felt more personally responsible for causing, and for addressing, U.S. recycling problems, and participants in the other-focused condition felt others were more responsible for causing U.S. recycling problems. Mean ratings of moral threat, guilt, and outrage did not differ between conditions. However, participants in the self-focused condition reported significantly more guilt than outrage. Mean recycling intentions did not differ between conditions, and attributing greater responsibility to self (versus others) was not associated with distinct patterns of moral cleansing. Furthermore, adding measures of moral responsibility to the path models from Study 1 resulted in poor model fit, suggesting that moral responsibility, at least in Study 2, played a minimal role in explaining how perceptions of moral threat led to greater prosocial intentions. To address inconsistencies between Studies 1 and 2, Study 3 replicated the procedures of Study 2 using a new sample, with the only change being the addition of a no-video control condition. Relative to the control condition, participants in all three video-based conditions felt more threatened, participants in the other-focused condition felt more guilty, and participants in the neutral and other-focused conditions felt more outraged. Ratings of causal and moral responsibility did not differ between conditions. Group comparison path models, with threat and moral emotions mediating the relationship between moral imperative and recycling intentions, were good fits to the data; however, unlike in Study 1, constraining paths to be equal across conditions did not worsen model fit in Study 3. Similar to Study 2, including moral responsibility in those models did not fit the data well. Taken together, the present research indicates that moral self-regulation is a promising avenue for future research into increasing proenvironmental behavior. In all three studies, exposure to threatening information made participants feel guilty and outraged, and guilt and outrage were correlated with greater recycling intentions. Future research can develop stronger manipulations that elicit guilt and outrage independently and examine when morally threatening situations elicit defensiveness rather than compensatory behavior.
Guilt, Moral beliefs, Outrage, Proenvironmental Behavior, Recycling, Psychology, Social Psychology
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations