Salient Self-Concept and Pro-environmental Volunteering

In this paper, we study the effect of an exogenous increase in the salience of pro-environmental self-concept on the willingness to contribute effort to a carbon abatement program. We designed an online experiment that consisted of two surveys, two days apart. In the first survey, we measured participants pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors to build a pro-environmental score. In addition, we included a task to measure participants' concern about image. In the second survey, participants were randomly assigned to a treatment where they received the pro-environmental score (salient self-concept) or no score (control). We find that participants in the treatment group are about 12% more likely to contribute effort for carbon abatement than those in the control group. Consistent with our hypothesis, the effect of salient self-concept is larger among participants who are more image concerned. In addition, participants who regard themselves with higher pro-environmental levels (those with higher pro-environmental scores in our study) are more likely to volunteer, and the pro-environmental score mediates the effects of education and personality traits on volunteering.