The Effects of Personality Variables and Values on Pro-environmental Product Purchase and Recycling Behaviors

This paper intends to investigate the hierarchical effects of personality variables and values on pro-environmental product purchase and recycling behaviors mediated by 3 factor environmental attitudes. Previous literature review on pro-environmental behaviors has three categories of research trends. The first category generally done during 70's and early 80's is mainly focused on identifying pro-environmental consumer groups. Second stream of studies has focused on the mediating and moderating effects of variables, such as PCE, environmental knowledge, the perceived importance of behavioral consequences etc., on various pro-environmental behaviors. The last and latest trends of literature is focused on hierarchical and interactive effects of variables on behaviors. Following the trends of literature is review of such specific variables as social responsibility, community mindedness, locus of control, values, and environmental attitudes. The result shows that both locus of control and social responsibility have positive effects on two of environmental attitudes, harmony with nature and limits to growth, but community mindedness did not have effects on environmental attitudes. And social belonging value has positive effects on two of environmental attitudes, limits to growth and nature over human, and environmental value has positive effects on the formation of harmony with nature and limits to growth. But self-actualization has negative effects. And it's also suggested the positive effects of environmental attitudes on purchase and recycling behaviors. Specifically, all environmental attitude variables have positive effects on the formation of pro-environmental product purchase and recycling behaviors except in case of the effects of nature over human to recycling. And it's also revealed that pro-environmental product purchase is a preceeding behavior to recycling behavior, which suggest that consumers have to purchase environment friendly and recyclable products in order to engage in effective recycling behavior. Various applications of the results are discussed in the conclusion.