Conference Paper 2022

Exploring cognitive pathways to sustainability – development and validation of personas for sustainable behavior

Over the last years, we could observe increasing awareness for sustainability and climate change in society. Individual sustainable behavior emerges by various influencing factors, resulting in different degrees of sustainable behavior. An important factor is the intention behind pro-environmental behavior, which can be goal-directed, motivated by other goals, or habitual. At the same time, good intentions do not always translate into sustainable actions. To develop interventions that promote pro-environmental behavior, we need to shed light on cognitive mechanisms underneath sustainable thoughts and how they stimulate actions. We conducted ten semi-structured interviews with representative individuals asking about their intentions, influencing factors of sustainability and examples from everyday life. Based on their scope of reflection, knowledge and predominant intention, five different sustainability personas were identified: sustainability-oriented, open-minded, opportunistic, careless and dismissive. We present personas, discuss the validation process and investigate cognitive mechanisms of reflection in the context of sustainable behavior.

Author(s): Laura Prislan and Maria Wirzberger
Book Title: 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Year: 2022
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive

BibTex

@inproceedings{prislan2022exploring,
  title = {Exploring cognitive pathways to sustainability – development and validation of personas for sustainable behavior},
  booktitle = {44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society},
  abstract = {Over the last years, we could observe increasing awareness for sustainability and climate change in society. Individual sustainable behavior emerges by various influencing factors, resulting in different degrees of sustainable behavior. An important factor is the intention behind pro-environmental behavior, which can be goal-directed, motivated by other goals, or habitual. At the same time, good intentions do not always translate into sustainable actions. To develop interventions that promote pro-environmental behavior, we need to shed light on cognitive mechanisms underneath sustainable thoughts and how they stimulate actions. We conducted ten semi-structured interviews with representative individuals asking about their intentions, influencing factors of sustainability and examples from everyday life. Based on their scope of reflection, knowledge and predominant intention, five different sustainability personas were identified: sustainability-oriented, open-minded, opportunistic, careless and dismissive. We present personas, discuss the validation process and investigate cognitive mechanisms of reflection in the context of sustainable behavior.},
  year = {2022},
  slug = {prislan2022exploring},
  author = {Prislan, Laura and Wirzberger, Maria}
}