Abstract
Pro-environmental behavior requires individuals to pay the cost to improve or protect the environment. The arousal: cost-reward model holds that emergency and cost jointly determine prosocial behaviors, and empirical evidence showed that emergency and cost were determinants of prosocial behaviors. However, the effects of emergency situations and costs on the pro-environmental behaviors and the underlying neurophysiological mechanism remain unclear. Using the event-related potential techniques, this study explored neural responses to the effects of emergency and cost on the pro-environmental behavior. Participants were asked to accept or reject pro-environmental options that involve different costs in emergency and non-emergency situations. The behavioral results showed that the pro-environmental behavior decreased as cost increase in non-emergency situations, whereas the high-cost pro-environmental behavior was significantly reduced, and low-cost and moderate-cost pro-environmental behaviors were not significant in emergency situations. The event-related potential results showed that the wave with a 300ms latency and late positive potential amplitudes of low cost were significantly higher than those of moderate and high costs in non-emergency situations, whereas there was not significant difference at the wave with a 300ms latency and late positive potential amplitudes of three costs in emergency situations. This suggests that emergency situations can induce more emotional arousal and increase low-cost and moderate-cost pro-environmental behaviors, but such empathic arousal cannot affect the high-cost pro-environmental behavior. Meanwhile, high cost generates also personal pain motivated by excessive self-sacrifice and further elicits high emotional arousal.
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The data supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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This work was supported by the major project of National Social Science Foundation of China [grant number:17ZDA326].
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Tan, M., Luo, X., Li, J. et al. Emergency and costs effect pro-environmental behavior: an event-related potential (ERP) study. Curr Psychol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05549-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05549-2