Why Are You Doing Things for the Environment? The Motivation Toward the Environment Scale (MTES)¹

TLDR

The subscales of the MTES correspond to the intrinsic, extrinsic, and other forms of motivation identified by Deci and Ryan’s self‑determination theory. This paper reports four studies aimed at constructing and validating the Motivation Toward the Environment Scale (MTES). The MTES comprises subscales that assess intrinsic, extrinsic, and other motivations for environmental behaviors, and the authors used these studies to establish its structure and reliability. Study 1 confirmed the MTES’s factor structure and internal consistency, and higher self‑determined motivation was associated with more positive environmental responses, underscoring implications for encouraging public environmental behavior.

Abstract

This paper presents 4 studies which were conducted for the purpose of constructing and validating a new measure of people's motivation for environmental behaviors, namely the Motivation Toward the Environment Scale (MTES). The MTES consists of subscales that measure an individual's level of intrinsic, extrinsic, and a motivation for environmental behaviors. These subscales correspond to the different forms of motivation identified by Deci and Ryan in their self‐determination theory (SDT, 1985, 1991). Results from the first study supported the factor structure of the scale and revealed a satisfactory level of internal consistency. Consistent with the SDT, the more self‐determined forms of motivation were associated with more positive responses on the related variables. Implications for the manner in which the public could be encouraged to do environmental behaviors are discussed.