Ecological footprint feedback: Motivating or discouraging?

Abstract

The Ecological Footprint questionnaire provides feedback about personal environmental impact, which is generally negative. An experiment examined the effect of ecological footprint feedback on pro-environmental behavior, and whether it depends on how much people base their self-esteem on environmentalism. Negative ecological footprint feedback marginally increased pro-environmental behavior of participants who based their self-esteem on environmentalism, but significantly decreased pro-environmental behavior of participants who did not base their self-esteem on environmentalism. Ecological footprint feedback seems beneficial only for people already personally invested in environmentalism.