Not everyone is average: the influence of accountability on pro-environmental behaviour across welfare groups

Abstract

Research on climate change increasingly highlights the importance of consumer behaviour in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, existing studies have mainly focused on either average consumers or the outsized objective environmental impact of high-welfare individuals, offering limited insight into how psychological factors shape pro-environmental behaviour across welfare groups. As a result, the relation between welfare, psychological measures, and pro-environmental behaviour remains insufficiently understood.
This study examines how individuals across welfare groups perceive self-accountability, agency, and efficacy, and how these psychological factors relate to pro-environmental intentions and behaviour across multiple consumption domains. Using a Dutch sample with a wide range of welfare levels, it also analyses how accountability is attributed to different societal actors and how welfare influences psychological predictors of behaviour in domains including fashion consumption, air travel, household heating, meat consumption, and green investment.
The findings show that perceptions of accountability to mitigate GHG emissions are broadly similar across welfare groups, with governments and large corporations seen as most accountable and individuals as least accountable. Welfare had no direct effect on perceived self-accountability, agency, or efficacy. These psychological factors were generally positive predictors of pro-environmental intentions and behaviour across domains. However, their predictive power weakened in specific domains, with the largest intention–behaviour gaps emerging in unbounded, identity-driven domains such as air travel and fashion consumption. Notably, it is also in these same domains that welfare showed significant direct effects on behaviour, with higher-welfare individuals engaging in more environmentally harmful consumption. While psychological measures were largely stable across welfare levels, this pattern suggests that welfare becomes more influential precisely in the domains where psychological factors are least explanatory. Overall, the results indicate that pro-environmental behaviour is shaped by both psychological processes and structural conditions, highlighting the need for integrated approaches that combine behavioural interventions with policies addressing consumption inequalities.
Finally, the findings indicate that climate interventions should focus on reducing the perception–reality gap in environmental impact. This may be achieved by aligning perceptions of “normal” consumption (through improved public information and reduced socio-economic segregation), strengthening carbon literacy (through education, point-of-decision information, and footprint comparison tools), and improving awareness of emission differences across income groups. At the same time, psychological interventions alone are unlikely to be sufficient in domains such as air travel and fashion consumption, where behaviour is strongly shaped by structural conditions. In these domains, policies such as aviation taxes, frequent flyer levies, improved access to low-carbon alternatives, and measures that slow fashion cycles while promoting more pro-environmental and appealing alternatives may be more effective.