Moral intuitions predict pro-social behaviour in a climate commons game

Abstract

The climate crisis and appeals to tackle it are often framed in moral terms, but few studies tested whether individual variation in moral intuitions correlate with pro-environmental behaviours that may affect the climate commons. In the present study we ask whether moral intuitions regarding harm (care and compassion), fairness, in-group loyalty, stance towards authority, and purity, as quantified by the Moral Foundations Theory, correlate with pro-environmental behaviours. Participants played 10 rounds of a public goods game framed as extraction of a mineral that affects climate commons negatively. We found that participants' extraction in the first round of the game was positively related to loyalty and authority moral foundations. Average extraction over all ten rounds of the game was negatively related to harm and positively related to loyalty moral foundations with small to moderate effect sizes. The fairness dimension was only weakly related to extraction in the first round and not related to average extraction over the entire game. Purity dimension did not relate to extraction neither in the first round nor on average. These results suggest that intrinsic factors such as moral intuitions are likely to play an important role in fostering pro-environmental behaviours to address the climate crisis.