ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicNarrating the environment: Innovation, looks and stories on real and virtual boundariesView all 10 articles
Going Green from Within: Correlational Insights into the Spread of Pro-Environmental Behavior through the Lens of Organismic Integration Theory
Provisionally accepted
- 1Interaction Design for Sustainability and Transformation, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany
- 2Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen Department Psychologie, Munich, Germany
- 3Ubiquitous Design / Experience & Interaction, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany
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The share of private household’s direct fuel use in global CO2 emissions accounts approximately 20 percent and, when indirect effects of their overall consumption are included, between 50 and 80 percent of the total resource use produced or imported by country. This underscores the importance of achieving savings through pro-environmental behavior (PEB) in all sectors of daily life, such as recycling and nutrition. As PEB is often perceived as unattractive and unexperiental, political measures using external incentives are predominantly consulted. However, these types of motivation tend to be short-term and context-related – unlike internal regulated motivation, which not only reinforces very probably PEB in terms of frequency but might have the potential to increase it across contexts by acting in line with personally valued, recognizing the personal and future relevance, and experiencing PEB as an expression of one’s own identity, thereby indirectly meeting psychological barriers in the context of environmentalism. Based on the Organismic Integration Theory (OIT), online surveys were conducted with participants from the Global North (N = 146), providing self-disclosure on their attitude towards environmentalism, their level of exposure to the negative consequences of climate change, their PEB in everyday life across various sectors and their type of regulation. The analysis confirmed all hypotheses, showing that higher internalized motivation was associated not only with more frequent PEB but also with its broader spread across different sectors of everyday life. Additionally, our findings indicate that the type of regulation according to OIT might be more closely associated with PEB than individuals’ direct exposure to climate change, even though intrinsic motivation, as the highest level of regulation, may not necessarily need to be the focus in the context of environmentalism.
Keywords: pro-environmental behavior, Pro-environmental motivation, OrganismicIntegration Theory, extrinsic motivation, Internal regulation, internalization, Cross-SectoralBehavior, environmental psychology
Received: 25 Aug 2025; Accepted: 31 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Molkenthin, Christoforakos, Hassenzahl and Laschke. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Maria Magdalena Molkenthin, magdalena.molkenthin@uni-siegen.de
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