Social identity as a key concept for connecting transformative societal change with individual environmental activism

By Maxie Schulte, S. Bamberg, Jonas H. Rees, Philipp Rollin. 2020

108 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper proposes social identity as a psychological concept that connects societal and individual aspects of transformation processes. To this end, we embed the social identity concept into the multilevel perspective, a framework frequently used for analysing societal transformation processes. The paper presents three meta-analyses summarizing the empirical evidence for the postulated strong pro-environmental social identity-pro-environmental collective action link. A first meta-analysis (nine samples) finds a pooled correlation of r+ = .63 between pro-environmental social identity and intention to participate in pro-environmental collective action. This finding is replicated in a second meta-analysis, which shows a correlation of r+ = 0.56 (15 samples). The third meta-analysis supports that pro-environmental social identity is a stronger predictor of collective pro-environmental action than of individual pro-environmental private-sphere behavior (r+ = 0.35; eight samples). We discuss implications of these findings for further research and highlight power and ideology as additional transformation-oriented psychological constructs.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9495a0c530763ab564b544580a534f080271f2f6