When sustainability aligns with adolescent motives: Development and validation of the Sustainability Motive-Alignment Scale (SMAS)

NOTE: After peer review, the manuscript was revised, resubmitted, and published. The publication is available open access at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10888691.2023.2260748 . Please refer to the published article. The sustainability motive-alignment hypothesis posits that adolescents will be internally motivated to act sustainably when they view sustainable behavior as aligned with their motives for autonomy and peer status. Based on this hypothesis, we developed the Sustainability Motive-Alignment Scale (SMAS), a brief self-report scale of individual differences in sustainability motive-alignment. In four studies across two relatively individualistic (U.S., Netherlands) and two relatively collectivistic countries (China, Colombia), the SMAS was reliable and valid as a single-factor scale; somewhat culturally variant, suggesting cultural differences in adolescents’ construals of sustainability motive-alignment (Study 2); and positively associated with measures of sustainable attitudes, norms, self-efficacy, behavior, and climate change knowledge (Studies 3 and 4). Thus, sustainability motive-alignment can be assessed as a conceptually distinct psychological dimension underlying adolescents’ sustainable tendencies. We hope that our brief, psychometrically sound instrument will spark developmentally informed research on the psychological underpinnings of adolescent sustainability.