Cognitive Abilities, Personality, and Sustainable Attitudes and Behavior

Climate change demands urgent action, yet individual engagement in sustainablebehaviors remains inconsistent. To better understand the factors that promote sustainablebehaviors, we conducted two studies (N₁ = 280, N₂ = 973) examining how politicalorientation, personality traits, reasoning ability, social-emotional-behavioral skills, andcomplex problem solving relate to sustainable attitudes and behaviors in U.S. adults. Usingstructural equation modeling, we found that openness to experience was the strongestpredictor, alongside liberal political orientation and self-perceived social engagement andinnovation skills. Unexpectedly, both reasoning ability and complex problem solving showedconsistent negative associations with sustainability outcomes, challenging assumptions thatcognitive abilities universally facilitate adaptive behavior. Psychological characteristicstogether explained approximately one-third of variance in both sustainable attitudes andbehaviors. Personality traits dominated explanation of attitudes, while behaviors emergedfrom more balanced contributions across psychological domains, with social-emotional skillsproviding meaningful incremental validity beyond established predictors. These findingsdemonstrate that personality psychology provides crucial insights for understandingenvironmental engagement, revealing that adaptive social-emotional competencies andpersonality characteristics are more strongly associated with sustainability than cognitiveabilities.