How does environmental knowledge translate into pro-environmental behaviors?: The mediating role of environmental attitudes and behavioral intentions.

By Pihui Liu, Minmin Teng, Chuanfeng Han. Science of the Total Environment, 2020

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This paper explores how general environmental knowledge shapes environmental attitudes, behavioral intentions, and pro-environmental behaviors in relation to the surrounding environment. Structural equation modeling (SEM) with bootstrapping estimation was conducted to assess a causal chain from environmental knowledge to pro-environmental behaviors with a nationally representative sample of 2824 respondents from China. The results show that environmental knowledge has a significant positive effect on environmental attitudes, environmental attitudes have a significant positive effect on environmental behavioral intentions and pro-environmental behaviors, and environmental behavioral intentions have a significant positive effect on pro-environmental behaviors. We also concluded that although environmental knowledge has no significant direct effects on pro-environmental behaviors, it is a crucial distal variable whose significant effect is fully mediated by environmental attitudes and environmental behavioral intentions. The results of the multigroup SEM showed that the moderating effect of external context on the relationship between environmental behavioral intentions and pro-environmental behaviors and various demographic variables (e.g., gender, urban vs. rural residence, education level, and region) have diverse effects on the model in this study.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/357d290985e203ac5ee82ff9995159ca90137bb7

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Citations in the corpus

Extending theory of planned behavior in household waste sorting in China: the moderating effect of knowledge, personal involvement, and moral responsibility (2020, background): “In China, the phenomenon of “the city besieged by waste” is becoming more and more serious, which has caused widespread concern from all walks of life in China (Liu et al. 2020).”
Green apparel buying behaviour: A Stimulus–Organism–Behaviour–Consequence (SOBC) perspective on sustainability‐oriented consumption in Japan (2021, background): “Although the vast majority of studies have considered intentions to be a dependent variable, some scholars have attempted to examine it as a mediator instead (e.g., Ertz et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2020).”