Environmental Education and Sustainability

Understanding why people choose to act in environmentally responsible ways—or fail to—sits at the intersection of psychology, policy, and education. Researchers draw on frameworks like the Theory of Planned Behavior and the Norm Activation Model to map how personal values, social expectations, and institutional incentives combine to shape everyday decisions, from household energy use to broader consumption patterns. Getting this right matters enormously for policy: knowing whether attitudes, norms, or knowledge gaps are the binding constraint on sustainable behavior determines which interventions—education campaigns, pricing signals, or social norm nudges—are likely to work. Open questions include how durable behavior change actually is once external programs end, and how findings translate across cultural contexts where the relative weight of individual versus collective norms differs substantially.

Works

71,623

Total citations

1,203,848

Keywords

Pro-environmental BehaviorEnvironmental AttitudesSocial NormsEnergy ConservationTheory of Planned BehaviorEnvironmental Education