What the heck are Compensatory Green Beliefs?!

Welcome to our first Phone a Friend Blog! Introducing Anna...

Hey there!

Good to meet you, I’m Anna and I was recently interviewed by Meg and Grace about my sustainability habits, intense love for peanut butter and masters research (check out the interview on the 180 insta page if you like!).

I am currently typing this with one hand after fracturing my elbow in a skateboarding accident (it sounds a lot cooler than it is) but looking forward to telling you a bit more about my master’s dissertation in environmental psychology!

My dissertation explored how we think about different environmental behaviours and how our behaviours affect one another. I focused on a set of beliefs called “compensatory green beliefs”. These are beliefs that positive environmental behaviours can compensate for behaviours that are negative for the environment. For example, the idea that recycling at home compensates for driving a car.

Research has found that individuals do take part in this kind of compensatory thinking. Perhaps because environmental behaviours now come with a moral dimension. For example, we feel guilty when we perform an environmentally detrimental behaviour and this can lead us to take part in something we view as “green” to cleanse our conscience.

In some ways this is encouraging because it shows that we care about the environment and recognise that our behaviours have an impact. However, compensatory green beliefs can potentially lead to an increase in environmentally detrimental behaviour. If you feel you have been “green” in a certain area (for example, eating vegetarian for a week) this may mean you feel you have earned the right to something “less green” (for example, flying abroad). The issue is that some actions have a much larger impact than others and our behaviours do not balance out so neatly. It takes quite a high level of environmental knowledge to know the real impact of certain actions.

So how is this research useful for the everyday person? All of us at some point are going to inevitably engage in behaviours that are bad for the environment because that is the way our society has been built. Also, I think the majority of us will always have a tendency towards compensatory thinking - it often happens without us even being aware of it! However, my masters has inspired me to research into which behaviours have the most impact and to try and be consistent with those ones. One step at a time. For example, I now understand that my recycling at home is not going to compensate for my excessive car use. So rather than focusing on recycling more to make up for my car use; I would rather use my time and energy to reduce my car use in some way, even if it seems small to start with.

I want to encourage you though that any action no matter how small does make a difference! If all you feel like you can manage is something small at this poi

nt in your life - then do that. I do believe that the attitude of your heart is important even if you don’t know a lot about the different impacts of certain behaviours. To close, though I would challenge you to think and research into which actions have the potential to elicit the most change. I have actually found it a lot less overwhelming in my own life to focus on a couple of bigger impact things than trying to tackle many things at once.

If you want to read more about compensatory green beliefs I suggest having a read of this paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0013916517706730

Thankyou for joining me for a little bit of your day :)

Take care,

Anna x