Normative, gain, and hedonic goal frames guiding environmental behavior - Lindenberg & Steg - 2007 - Article

Each person looks different at different situations. This will obviously determine how that person will behave in that situation. People have goal frames and these are the ways in which they process information and act upon it. Changing goals also means perceiving the information differently. When a goal is activated, we call it focal and the goal is a combination of a motivate and knowledge. A goal frame is a focal goal and its framing effects. This are effects on cognitive processing. People usually have more goals active at the same time but there will be one goal that dominates the framing process.

According to the goal-framing theory goals direct what knowledge and attitudes become cognitively accessible, which alternatives will be accessible, what people will do and how people will evaluate aspects of a situation. There are some goals that govern the whole are of subgoals, attitudes and knowledge. There are three of these that have been found and that have a connection to environmental psychology. The first one is the hedonic goal, which is the goal to make you feel better immediately. The second one is the gain goal, which guards and improves one’s resources and the third one is the normative goal, which makes you act appropriately. When a certain goal becomes active, it will guide people’s actions, perceptions and thoughts.

Hedonic goal frames activate certain subgoals that improve the way somebody feels in a particular situation (seeking pleasure, seeking self-esteem). People want to realize this goal to improve the way they feel. People in this frame are sensitive to the things that increase and the things that decrease their pleasure and have an effect on their mood. If you have a plastic bottle in your room you get a feeling of uncleanness you want to get rid of. A plastic bottle has to be brought back to the store or put in a bin that is made for plastic material. However, this costs energy. You can throw it away in your own bin and you will feel better because it didn’t cost you energy and there is no uncleanness anymore. A hedonic goal frame doesn’t last that long.

Gain goal frames will activate subgroups that improve one’s resources or the efficiency of resources. The time horizon of gain goal frame is medium to long. When a spray is harmful for the environment, but cheaper than a spray that is not harmful, people will probably chose the cheaper spray. In this situation, subgoals that have to do with resources (like having money) will be easily activated and subgoals that have to do with feelings and normative behaviour are not easily approachable.

A normative goal frame activates subgoals associated with appropriateness. People will become sensitive to what they think a person should do. The situation is normative, because the person looks at what people think they need to do and what the person himself or herself thinks he or she should do. The person also observes what people are doing. When somebody has a normative goal frame, this person will turn down the heating when a window is open, even if he or she does not have to pay for the heating bill. This person does this because it is the appropriate thing to do.

The subgoals that have to do with the way a person feels and personal resources are not important when the normative goal frame is activated.

The normative goal frame is all about acting appropriately. When you want to act appropriately, you must look in your memory or into the environment to figure out what the best way to act is. When the norms are abstract, it is difficult to know what behaviour is appropriate. These norms are called smart norms, because people really need to think hard about the abstract norm and translate this into a concrete decision. People need to know what is environmentally harmful rather than moral training when they want to deal with these norms. Maybe you really want to act appropriately, but you don’t know how. The gain goal or hedonic goal will replace the normative goal frame in this situation.

Motivations are usually heterogeneous. Having a normative goal frame does not mean that you don’t look at gains. One study shows that when the amount of the money to be divided increases, people will not distribute the money equally anymore, but more in favour of the divider. Sometimes the goal frame and background goals will be in conflict. Sometimes you want to be environmental and use environmental friendly paint, but this may be very expensive. The goal frame and background motives will be incompatible. The background motive will not affect the orientation (you still think in terms of appropriateness), but you may choose the less appropriate alternative. Background goals do not necessarily weaken workings of the goal frame. When the two are compatible, it can strengthen it. The hedonic goal frame seems to be the strongest, because it doesn’t require much support from the individual’s environment.

Environmental behaviour and goal frames

These three goals can fit within environmental psychology, by looking at one kind of motivation. The norm activation model looks at factors that make people act pro-environmentally. This looks like a normative goal frame applied to environment. The theory of planned behaviour is quit the opposite of this. This theory assumes that people are motivated by self-interest. They chose for high benefits and low costs. This looks much like the gain goal frame. Theories on affect focus on feeling good and this looks like the hedonic goal frame. But it’s hard to figure out in which condition which theory is the most powerful in explaining environmental behaviour.

Hedonic goal frames are focused on improvement of feelings. Factors such as mood and social atmosphere are important in this goal frame. Emotions and affect have a big impact on motivation and behaviour. Yet only a few studies have looked at the relationship between affect and environmental behaviour. One study found that affect was significantly related to environmental behaviour. The study found that people will act more environmental friendly when they derive pleasure and satisfaction from acting this way. Another study found a strong relationship between affect and car-use. People who are more emotionally attached to car-use also drive more frequently and are more against anti car-use campaigns. They also evaluate the use of cars as more favourable than the use of public transport.

These people will not look much at the finances of the whole picture and let their affect guide them more. Another study found that the more intense emotions people have to environmental degradation, the more likely they are to engage in pro-environmental behaviour.

Gain goals try to improve an individual’s personal resources. People are very sensitive to costs and benefits and scarce resources. According to the theory of planned behaviour, people are motivated by self-interest and they weigh expected costs and benefits of alternatives. According to this theory people first need the intention to behave in a specific manner and then they will behave in this manner. Intention depends on attitudes towards the behaviour, behavioural control and social norms. Attitudes are the beliefs about costs and benefits, social norms are the pressures to engage in a certain behaviour and behavioural control refers to the perceived possibility to perform the behaviour. Attitudes have the strongest effect on pro-environmental behaviours. Social costs and benefits have the biggest impact on travel mode choices.

When you look at the environmental context a normative goal frame suggests that people act environmentally without paying much attention to costs or hedonic factors. When people are aware of environmental problems, they will be much more willing to engage in pro-environmental behaviour. The people who were highly concerned with the environment, focused on environmental consequences of their behaviour, whereas people who were less concerned with the environment considered personal outcomes more. The norm-activation model (NAM) looks at normative concerns. According to this model, personal norms are responsible for behaviours. These norms can be activated when people are aware of the consequences of their behaviour to others and the environment and when they belief that they can avert these consequences. The NAM has been ‘transformed’ into another theory, the value-belief-norm theory of environmentalism (VBN theory). This theory suggests that awareness and consequences and ascription of responsibility are dependent on general beliefs about human-environmental relations. These two theories are good in explaining low-cost environmental behaviour, but not in explaining high-cost environmental behaviour (like behaviour that costs much and that is inconvenient).

One study showed that concerns with norms will be replaced by concerns with gains when the costs increase. Also, when people don’t know how to behave environmentally, they will switch from the normative-goal frame to a hedonic or gain goal-frame. Ambiguous information can also cause this to happen. People can deny the seriousness of problems, by minimizing the results of certain practices. Also, people may believe that they are not the cause of these problems and that the problems are a result of collective action. People often see authority figures or the industry as the cause of environmental problems. People may also not act environmentally, because they think that their actions will not have a big impact and that other people are needed or they think that they can’t act environmentally (they don’t have the knowledge, capacity).

Acting in one’s own self-interest seems to be very attractive, because driving cars is a part of our society and buying cheap food (not organic) seems to be in our best self-interest. However, we all know that in the long run our society would be better of if we acted pro-environmentally. It seems that environmental behaviour is caused by multiple motivations.

Stimulating pro-environmental behaviour

The normative goal-frame seems to be the most important one for pro-environmental behaviour. People who hold environmental norms, but are not in the mood to act environmentally (hedonic goal-frame) will not act environmentally friendly. People in the gain goal-frame will only act environmentally friendly if the costs are minimized. If the government would charge people for every garbage bag they leave in front of their house, the people in the gain goal-frame will act environmental friendly and bring the garbage to a garbage holder.

To achieve the normative frame and smart-norm behaviour, two things are necessary. The first thing is that high abstract smart norms must be linked to low level smart norms about environmental friendly behaviour and this should be linked to specific behaviour. The second thing is that hedonic and gain goals in the background must be made compatible with normative goals or they must be weakened. Normative goals can only affect behaviour when they are dominant and when people know which behaviour is appropriate in a given situation. This means that smart norms need to be translated to specific situations. People might not act according to smart norms if they don’t have enough knowledge of environmental problems and if they aren’t aware of the environmental impact associated with their behaviour. They therefore maybe do not know which behaviour is good for the environment. Environmental labelling may help translate smart norms into behaviour. Feedback may also help promote environmental friendly behaviour. A way in which hedonic and gain goals can compete with environmental smart norms is by making them subject of moralization. This means that if somebody shows environmental unfriendly behaviour, people will react with a negative emotion. Usually environmental smart goals are no fun and cost more (like organic food, which is expensive). Researchers need to find a way to make those goals more fun for people.