Anticipated and experienced positive affect shape sustainable action in everyday life

Emotions are powerful drivers of human behavior that may make people aware of the urgency to act to mitigate climate change and provide a motivational basis to engage in sustainable action. However, attempts to leverage emotions via climate communications have yielded unsatisfactory results, with many interventions failing to produce the desired behaviors. Considering emotions as simple behavioral levers without considering differences in the underlying affective mechanisms may not optimally exploit their potential to promote sustainable action. Across two field experiments, here we show that individual predispositions to experience positive emotions in an environmental context (trait affect) predict pro-environmental actions and corresponding shifts in affective states (towards personal as well as witnessed pro-environmental actions). Moreover, trait affect predicts the individual behavioral impact of emotion-based intervention strategies from positive environmental messages. These findings have important implications for the targeted design of affect-based interventions aiming to promote sustainable behavior.