Understanding environmental decision making: The association between stages of decision making and decisional conflict - 25/07/25

Highlights |
• | People go through different stages when making environmental decisions. |
• | Individuals experience decisional conflict when making decisions around pro-environmental behaviours. |
• | Being in later stages of decision making is associated with less decisional conflict. |
• | Stages of decision making might be taken into account in decision aids designed to support environmental decision making. |
Abstract |
Introduction: As research highlights how climate change impacts individual and planetary health, people might consider reducing their ecological footprint by acting pro-environmentally. However, their choice might depend on how far along they are in the process of deciding to act pro-environmentally (i.e., different stages of decision making) and on their experienced difficulty in deciding in favour of the environment and which behaviour to conduct (i.e., decisional conflict).
Methods: To explore in which stage participants find themselves (i.e., not yet thinking about choices, showing interest in doing so, actively considering options, approaching a decision, having already decided but remaining open to reconsideration, or being firmly committed to a decision with little chance of change) and whether their respective stages are correlated with their experienced decisional conflict, an online, cross-sectional questionnaire was distributed among a convenience sample of 418 English-, Dutch-, and Italian-speaking adults to measure participants’ demographics, stages, and extent to which they experience decisional conflict.
Results: Based on regression analyses, we observed that participants who were further along in the stages experienced less decisional conflict.
Conclusion: Therefore, we suggest that interventions (e.g., decision aids) take stages into account to better meet users’ needs and assist people in making environmental decisions.
Le texte complet de cet article est disponible en PDF.Keywords : Pro-environmental behaviours, Stages of decision making, Decisional conflict
Plan
| Note: This research study is part of a joint project together that was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework (OSF) Vissers, E., Richelli, L., Gorini, A., Meijers, M. H. C., Ruiter, R. A., Smit, E. S., & Gültzow, T. (2022, July 29). Understanding decisional conflict around environmental decisions and the influence of stages of decision making. Retrieved from mgvjb. |
Vol 24
Article 100467- juillet 2025 Retour au numéroBienvenue sur EM-consulte, la référence des professionnels de santé.
