The Roles of Professional Socialization and Higher Education Context in Prosocial and Pro-Environmental Attitudes of Social Science and Humanities versus Business Students in Italy and Croatia

Abstract

According to the bio-ecological model, individuals are highly influenced by the context and dynamic interactions occurring within their environment over time. Therefore, prolonged shared contexts that people are exposed to, such as the higher education system, should contribute to more similarities in their cognition. We examine two research models, specifying the influence of the national higher education system as a variable, that moderates the potential relationship between the students’ country of origin and their prosocial (Model 1) and pro-environmental (Model 2) attitudes. Two culturally similar countries (Croatia and Italy) and two student subsamples from both countries (one group with social science and humanities majors and another with business and economics major) are considered. We used A. F. Hayes’ PROCESS macro to estimate the results using the regression approach. The research results show statistically significantmoderated relationships between study major and prosocial and pro-environmental attitudes. However, the national HE contexts, when considered as moderating variables, suppressed the main effects in both models. We discuss possible explanations of the suppression of the main effect by the conditional one, outline implications of the present findings and provide guidelines for future research.