Neuroscientific Approaches to Understand Barriers and Promotors of Pro-environmental Behavior

Despite the mounting impacts of climate change, shrinking biodiversity, and related environmental challenges, individuals find it difficult to adopt more sustainable behaviors. This is often a motivational problem transcending lack of knowledge or structural barriers, in that even individuals with pro-environmental attitudes often fail to act accordingly. Environmental psychology and related disciplines have identified factors that contribute to this so-called intention–behavior gap, including low-level cognitive biases, worldviews, social norms, risk perception, and perceived behavioral control. These observations are largely based on self-report data or choice behavior in experimental settings, both featuring particular advantages and disadvantages. More recently, neuroscientific approaches have been adopted to the pro-environmental behavior domain, as they are able to assess more implicit processes related to outcome evaluation, decision-making, and motivation in general that guide our actions. In turn understanding these processes can be valuable for promoting more sustainable behaviors to mitigate climate change and counteract biodiversity decline. In this chapter, we highlight two lines of work at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and environmental psychology in detail, discuss related research and future avenues, as well as implications and critical issues in this emerging field.