Abstract
Ecological behaviour is often conceptualized as an instance of cooperating in a social dilemma situation. Thus, it has been argued to relate to dispositional tendencies of moral virtue and pro-social orientation. To embed such notions in models of basic personality, we herein predicted that the recently proposed sixth basic personality factor, Honesty-Humility - which specifically pertains to individual differences in cooperativeness - is linked to environmental attitudes and ecological behaviour. Results from two studies (N=137 and N=531, respectively) supported these hypotheses and showed that Honesty-Humility explains incremental variance beyond the remaining, more classical five factors of personality. In addition, mediation analyses revealed that Honesty-Humility exerts part of its influence via individual differences in pro-social value orientations. Individual tendencies to cooperate in social dilemma situations could thus be shown to form a bridge between basic personality dimensions and ecological behaviour.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | European Journal of Personality |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Pages (from-to) | 319-327 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| ISSN | 0890-2070 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jul 2013 |
| Externally published | Yes |