Undergraduate Research: An Archive - 2021 Program

Kailie McGeoy ’21
PSYCHOLOGY
Certificate in Environmental Studies
POLICY, NORMS
AND BEHAVIOR
THESIS TITLE
To Be a Sheep or to Be a
Shepherd? How Political
and Religious Identities
Influence Environmental
Dilemma Decisions and
Post-Decision Emotions
ADVISER
Elke Weber, Gerhard R.
Andlinger Professor in
Energy and the
Environment, Professor
of Psychology and the
School of Public and
International Affairs
Study participants were presented with a
hypothetical commons (public resources)
dilemma asking how many sheep they would own
as part of a communal pasture. The two present
studies tested religious and political identity
salience and in-group behavior information
against differences in repeated commons’
dilemma choices and post-decision emotions.
Participants were assigned to three groups
where, before their second decision, they were
told their in-group acted similarly to their first
decision (congruent), dissimilarly (incongruent),
or no information was provided (control). As
expected, incongruent participants experienced
significant differences between decisions in the
direction of the in-group behavior. However,
across both studies, participants that chose
a low eco-friendly option in the first decision
experienced significant decreases in their second
decision regardless of treatment group. To our
surprise, negative-emotion scores decreased
significantly across studies and groups. In the
religious study, social identity was a predictor
of commons’ differences, regardless of first
choice, and personal identity was a predictor of
commons’ differences for participants who chose
low eco-friendly first choices. These findings
suggest that when identity is salient, non-ecoconscious
behavior is more susceptible to change
than eco-conscious behavior, and that negative
emotions typically decrease between repeated
measures, regardless of several variables.
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