Discounting the future: The effect of collective motivation on investment decisions and acceptance of policies for renewable energy

Abstract

Climate protection is a collective project. However, most previous research on people’s pro-climate behavior ignores the collective dimension, looking at personal private-sphere behavior and considering personal cost-benefit predictors only. The present paper transcends this individualistic perspective by addressing behaviors that target collective transformation (i.e., financial investments in renewable energy projects and the acceptance of renewable energy policies) and predictors of collective cognition and motivation (i.e., social identity). Combining insights and methods from economics and psychology, the current research investigates if collective pro-environmental motivation (e.g., pro-environmental ingroup norms, collective climate efficacy beliefs) can add to the explanation of investment decisions and the acceptance of policies for renewable energies, also beyond personal psychological and economic factors. Results from a multi-country survey (31 European countries, N = 18,037), including a discrete choice experiment, showed that collective pro-environmental motivation was positively correlated with the acceptance of green energy policies and negatively correlated with discounting of future benefits (money discount rate) in investment decisions for renewable energies. Importantly, collective pro-environmental motivation remained a significant predictor of policy acceptance and the discount rate after controlling for personal pro-environmental motivation. Furthermore, the associations between collective pro-environmental motivation and our outcome measures were stronger for respondents who highly identified with their group compared to low identifiers. Our (correlational) results are one of the first to show that collective psychological factors are a unique predictor of green investment behavior and acceptance of green policies. From an applied perspective, our findings suggest that interventions should target agentic social identities with norms supporting pro-environmental behavior to increase acceptance of and participation in the transformation towards carbon neutrality, particularly for persons with low personal pro-environmental motivation.