Psychological ownership as a facilitator of

Note this is the authors’ first draft version! Cite as: Suessenbach, S. & Kamleitner, B. (forthcoming): Psychological ownership as a facilitator of sustainable behaviors. In Joann Peck & Szanne Shu: Psychological Ownership (tbd). Springer.

Psychological ownership as a facilitator of sustainable behaviors

Sophie Suessenbach, WU Vienna, Austria Bernadette Kamleitner, WU Vienna, Austria

Introduction Continued use and enjoyment of any good or system requires sustainable usage. This holds in particular in the context of the environment. Many agree that the world ought to become a more sustainable place. We, its residents, ought to behave more sustainably. But what does this mean? As Costanza and Patten (1995, p. 193) put it “a sustainable system is one which survives or persists”. Acting sustainably, thus, entails acting with the future in mind and making sure that actions of the present do not jeopardize prospective resources and possibilities. In other words, sustainability means to behave responsibly, to maintain, and nurture what we have so that it may continue to provide us with value. Incessant calls for more sustainability may generate the impression that the default for human behavior is to behave unsustainably. This is far from being the truth. Humans regularly behave sustainably. For example, people nurture and invest into the system of their household (Galster, 1983). Mostly, they also do what they can to sustain and enhance the system of their body (Davis, 2013; Katz, 1983). For systems or assets that are close to people we often observe behaviors that can best be described as sustainable. In contrast, with regard to bigger systems that involve or concern multiple actors, such as large corporations or the environment, humans often appear to behave unsustainably. The key to increasing sustainable behaviors in these domains may be an understanding of why and when people do behave sustainably in other domains. In this chapter we delve into one specific answer and potential key: the experience of ownership. Several findings suggest that

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people tend to behave sustainably when faced with something that they feel to own, i.e., when they feel that something is “theirs” and they experience “psychological ownership” (Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2003). For example, psychological ownership has been used to explain why some businesses are more likely to be run with an orientation towards sustainable, long-term success (Hernandez, 2012) and why individual staff members go out of their way to help bring this about (Mustafa, Ramos, & Man, 2015; O'Driscoll, Pierce, & Coghlan, 2006). It has also been shown to explain why sole owners exert more care towards consumer goods than joint owners (Kamleitner & Rabinovich, 2010), and why consumers invest into warranties that guarantee long-term product enjoyment (Lessard-Bonaventure & Chebat, 2015). All these examples show that psychological ownership can instigate sustainable behavior. In this chapter, we ask whether and how psychological ownership may stimulate sustainable behaviors even in contexts in which people tend to behave unsustainably. We do so by focusing on the context in which sustainability matters perhaps most: the environment. We ask whether consumers can establish feelings of ownership for the environment, whether this would make them behave more responsibly, and how such feelings could be brought about. To address these questions, we provide an initial review of why it is necessary to foster sustainability with regard to the environment. We then highlight some of the main barriers preventing consumers from behaving environmentally friendly. Subsequently, we introduce the notion of psychological ownership as a potential solution and explain how it may combat most systematic barriers to sustainability. We argue that psychological ownership helps and discuss. Finally, we address potential mechanisms for inducing psychological ownership for abstract and ubiquitous systems such as the environment and conclude with insights and recommendations geared towards sustainability at large.

Sustainability as a particular challenge with regard to the environment

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The term environment is often used. In part, this results from the term’s eventual abstractness. Anything surrounding a target of attention can be termed its environment. Yet, in discourses of sustainability the term is meant to refer to a system in which the whole of humanity is embedded. By environment we mean “the natural [emphasis added] world as a whole […]” and “the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates” (Oxford Dictionary online, 2016). The natural environment, in contrast to the built environment, includes all living things (fauna and flora) and natural elements such as air, water, soil or climate (Johnson et al., 1997). It comprises all elements “which in their complex interrelationships form the framework, setting and living conditions for mankind, by their very existence or by virtue of their impact“ (Council of the European Communities, 1976, p. 2). It is this, the natural environment in its entirety that we refer to as “the environment”. And it is this environment that is, now more than ever, in danger. Ensuring that the functionality of the environment can be sustained is one of the most important challenges humanity is currently facing. Humanities consumption outstrips the environment’s capacity for replenishment at increasing rates. To support current human demands, in 2016 1.6 planets would already be needed (Global Footprint Network, 2016a). To illustrate, this means that already on August 8th, we used up all the natural resources for the year. It is concerning that this so called overshoot day tends to happen a bit earlier year on year. Thirty years ago (1976) the overshoot day was still more than three months later in the year, on November 19th (Global Footprint Network, 2016b). A growing world population and an increase in consumption by many currently less affluent societies is likely to keep aggravating the issue. The need for a more considerate treatment of our limited resources and a change of consumption patterns is hence imminent. But what does it mean to behave sustainably towards the environment, i.e., proenvironmentally? One of the challenges of pro-environmental behavior is that it comprises a vast variety of different actions. All behaviors that “consciously seek to minimize the negative 3


impact of one’s actions on the natural and built world” (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002, p. 240) are considered pro-environmental. Nearly everything a person does can be done with the environment in mind. This entails a range of actions that differ in terms of their main intent and public observability. The spectrum includes publicly observable pro-environmental signaling, such as environmental activism, less publicly observable behaviors, such as signing petitions, donating for pro-environmental causes, or being prepared to pay higher taxes to combat environmental issues, and everyday behaviors in the private sphere that also hold implications for the environment, such as waste separation, replacement decisions, and the choice of transportation mode (Stern, 2000). This shows that pro-environmental behaviors come in many guises and that they can be embedded into nearly everything humans do. The actual problem is not down to one single behavior but encompasses a multitude of, by themselves, small acts and decisions. This makes tackling environmental issues a though challenge. One of the consequences is that legislation does not suffice in instigating the needed scope of pro-environmental behaviors. In particular, the necessary reduction of consumption is unlikely to become legally enforced, notwithstanding that, ideally, it would need to be enforced on a global basis. The challenge of ensuring a sustainable future eventually rests on the shoulders of consumers.

Barriers to pro-environmental behavior In many industrialized societies, consumers appear to be aware of the challenges unsustainable consumer behaviors bring about. Many know that their own ways of consuming, e.g., food waste, car use, and early phone replacements, harm the environment. And if one looks at people’s attitudes they mostly are pro-environmental. The problem is that many people do not act accordingly (Kormos & Gifford, 2014; Newton & Meyer, 2013). For example, one study showed that 40 percent of participants indicate positive attitudes towards the purchase of green

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products, however, only one out of ten people reports wanting to purchase green products (amounting to 4% in the total sample) actually did so (United Nations Environment Program, 2005). This phenomenon is an instance of the so called attitude-behavior gap (de Jonge, Fischer, & van Trijp, 2014) which is often observed for socially desirable behaviors. Individuals feel positive towards what they find desirable, in this case sustainable behaviors, and embrace proenvironmental attitudes, but do not behave pro-environmentally (Carrington, Neville, & Whitwell, 2014). The reasons for why attitudes do not translate into actual behaviors are manifold. In essence, they boil down to mental or factual barriers that prevent consumers from doing what they feel should be done. Some of the main barriers are as follows. Lack of perceived efficacy. One reason for why many individuals do not act proenvironmentally, is their perceived lack of efficacy. The environment is a massive and complex system that is affected by the interplay of all natural elements and the entire world population. The earth currently hosts about 7.5 billion inhabitants. Being only one among them may make consumers easily feel as if they were unable to effectuate any change. In case individuals feel that way, they are unlikely to engage in pro-environmental acts (Roberts, 1996). Lack of perceived responsibility. In a related vein, the more individuals are involved in a dilemma, the less responsible each individual feels for any outcome. This phenomenon is called diffusion of responsibility (Darley & Latané, 1968; Leary & Forsyth, 1987). It is easy to see how it may act as a barrier to pro-environmental behaviors. With 7.5 billion others to share the blame, a perceived lack of responsibility for the environment in each individual is likely. The consequence of a reduction in responsibility is diminished care (Farsides, 2010; Greitemeyer, Fischer, Kastenmueller, & Frey, 2006; Johansson & Svedsater, 2009) and thus lack of proenvironmental behaviors. Lack of relevance and immediate benefits. Another reason for why people may not go out of their way to actually act in a pro-environmental manner is the (lack of) relevance of the 5


immediate outcome for the individual. The benefits of pro-environmental behaviors are mostly located at an abstract and more societal level, rather than satisfying immediate personal needs (de Jonge et al., 2014). For example, separating waste has no immediate and relevant benefits apart from perhaps a clean conscience. Likewise, sustainable aspects of a product (e.g., Fairtrade, sustainable fishery) often do not directly affect the primary benefits derived from the product, like price, taste, or quality. Rather, they add a secondary benefit such as feeling like a better person. Consumers often struggle to forgo a primary benefit in order to gain a secondary one. When actually facing a decision, clear cut consequences that immediately affect the self tend to have more influence than abstract long-term consequences that may be hard to determine and are not directly felt by the self (Ellen, 1994). Immediate costs. While the benefits of pro-environmental behaviors are hard to capture and tend to be abstract, such as feeling like a “good” person that “helps the planet”, the costs are immediate and concrete. Personal costs include monetary but also non-monetary costs, such as time, energy, inconveniences, or risks (Belz & Peattie, 2010). Most of the aforementioned pro-environmental behaviors, especially the publicly observable ones, come along with immediate costs for the individual. Donations cost money, waste separation costs time, saving electricity costs giving up conveniences, and going by bike instead of using a car costs physical energy (c.f. Olson, 2013). Behaving in a sustainable manner, hence, seems rather costly, and yet it does not tend to provide direct and immediate primary benefits.

All in all and from the short-term perspective of individual acts, there seems to be little that makes acting in pro-environmental ways attractive for the individual, apart from its moral desirability. Strategies that aim to instigate actual pro-environmental behaviors thus encounter a multitude of barriers that need to be overcome. In addition, they ideally also simultaneously instigate a multitude of different behaviors, ranging from waste separation, over reduced consumption to the signing of petitions. While fostering specific behaviors such as waste 6


separation is a needed first step, in the long run, we need strategies that get to the root of the problem and change several behaviors with one blow. One potential way to do so is to strengthen the bond between an individual and the environment. Doing so could bridge the gap between attitudes and behaviors, enhance the sense of efficacy and responsibility, increase the perceived benefits of pro-environmental behavior, and make outcomes of pro-environmental actions more relevant. We suggest that psychological ownership for the environment could fit this bill.

The environment as a target for psychological ownership Theoretically, feelings of ownership can be experienced for anything, including tangible objects like cups or pens (Peck, Barger, & Webb, 2013), something rather intangible like a brand (Chang, Kwak, Puzakova, Park, & Smit, 2015), an investment (Kirk, McSherry, & Swain, 2015) or a job (Brown, Pierce, & Crossley, 2013), something as abstract as an idea (Baer & Brown, 2012) or even something as elusive as environmental issues (Hungerford & Volk, 1990). Psychological ownership is embodied in the expression by “this is mine!” Pierce et al. (2003, p. 86). Such feelings of ownership can easily exist in the absence of legal rights. They can also emerge for common goods such as the environment or aspects of it. In fact, in prior work (Suessenbach & Kamleitner, 2015) we found that people report feelings of ownership for the environment and that there are substantial variations in the degree to which people experience these feelings. Instigating psychological ownership for the environment seems fruitful for at least two reasons. First, psychological ownership engenders mostly positive effects for the target object. Feelings of ownership positively affect individuals’ attitudes (Jussila, Tarkiainen, Sarstedt, & Hair, 2015; Kamleitner, 2011), monetary valuations (Brasel & Gips, 2014; Reb & Connolly, 2007), and willingness to invest into the target object (Asatryan & Oh, 2008; Kamleitner &

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Feuchtl, 2015; Lee, Kim, Graefe, & Chi, 2013; Peck & Shu, 2009). Intimately related to its legal equivalent (Etzioni, 1991; Kamleitner & Dickert, 2015), psychological ownership makes people expect rights but also respect obligations towards a target. It can increase citizenship behavior (O'Driscoll et al., 2006), extra-role behavior (Mustafa et al., 2015; Vandewalle, Vandyne, & Kostova, 1995), and more generally the perceived responsibility for and desire to care for a target (Kamleitner & Rabinovich, 2010; Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2001). The stronger feelings of ownership become, the stronger one feels beholden towards the target object and obligated to protect it. Second, though most of the existing literature pertains to the experience of individual ownership, psychological ownership can be a collective experience (Burgoyne, Reibstein, Edmunds, & Dolman, 2007; Furby, 1980a; Kamleitner, 2014; Pierce & Jussila, 2010). This is particularly relevant when it comes to the environment which naturally has to be shared with many others. Though empirical evidence on collective ownership is still in its infancy, initial results suggest that it, too, may enhance behaviors that aim at a sustainable use of the collectively owned target (Aryee, Seidu, Sacramento, & Martinaityte, 2015; Kamleitner & Rabinovich, 2010).

Psychological ownership as breaking barriers to pro-environmentalism Psychological ownership usually entails positive consequences for targets. However, it would need to overcome all the afore-mentioned barriers, to also engender these consequences for the environment. We address whether and why psychological ownership holds the potential to do so. Efficacy. One of the main reasons for people to strive for psychological ownership is because it allows a sense of effectance and control (Beggan, 1991; Furby, 1980b; Pierce et al., 2003). Even imagined or potential control over an object leads to enhanced perceptions of

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ownership (Baxter, Aurisicchio, & Childs, 2015a; Peck et al., 2013). Likewise, perceptions of ownership engender a sense of control (Nash & Rosenthal, 2014; Shaw, Li, & Olson, 2012). Given that perception of control lies at the heart of perceived efficacy (Ajzen, 2002), psychological ownership for the environment should help to break the barrier of an often perceived lack of efficacy. ‘If the environment is mine/ours, I/we also hold the power to change it.’ Responsibility. Psychological ownership results in an increase of perceived responsibility for the target of ownership (Furby, 1978; Kamleitner & Rabinovich, 2010; Pierce et al., 2003). While legal ownership ties responsibilities and obligations to the owner by law (Snare, 1972), psychological ownership brings about a personal and intrinsic perception of responsibility. In the context of the environment, individuals are simply not able to legally own the entire natural environment and, hence, cannot be made responsible for it by legislation. However, instigating psychological ownership for the environment can increase the extent to which consumers feel an obligation to protect and care for the environment. This holds also if they experience collective ownership. Both individual and collective psychological ownership can instill a sense of responsibility (Kamleitner & Rabinovich, 2010). Psychological ownership can thus counteract the diffusion of responsibility in the context of environmental protection. Relevance, benefits, and costs. The perception of ownership creates a bond between a target and a person. We can furnish our self-perception and create our self-identity through the acquired object (Belk, 1988; Grayson & Shulman, 2000). The things we claim and appropriate become part of us or even create who we are (Diesendruck & Perez, 2015; James, 1890/1999; Sartre, 1992). Through this bond everything that affects the target, also somewhat affects the owner (Kamleitner, 2014). Thus, if we felt like owning the environment, doing something good to the environment, would be like partly doing something good for ourselves. Ownership thus enhances self-relevance. This holds potentially powerful implications for the often unfavorable balance between the costs and benefits of pro-environmental behaviors. As previously 9


mentioned, behaving pro-environmentally is costly. It means “significant time and effort to actively change” (Ellen, 1994, p. 44) actual behavior. Moreover, if people feel no ownership for the environment the benefits of behaving pro-environmentally appear to be “distant and seem negligible in comparison to the immediate, personal reward” (Hummel, Levitt, & Loomis, 1978, p. 39). With the onset of psychological ownership these perceptions may change. Perceived benefits of acting in a pro-environmental manner could become of a more immediate and greater value, being imbued with additional meaning even cost perceptions could change (Kamleitner & Ruzeviciute, 2016) and the cost-benefit ratio may become favorable. Multiple behaviors. Lastly and crucially, psychological ownership is also a mechanism that potentially affects multiple behaviors simultaneously. Take the example of a house. If people feel a strong sense of ownership for a house they will be more likely to invest in highquality interiors and fixtures, regularly clean the windows, and steam-clean the carpets. They will watch out for any tell-tale signs of deterioration, insure the structure highly, and be prepared to spend considerable time on home improvements. Psychological ownership ties people to all aspects of a target and makes them see the target through a different lens (Kamleitner, 2014). The before-mentioned increase in responsibility acts like a blanket safeguard that affects not only one specific type of behavior (e.g., waste separation) but any kind of behavior that positively affects, protects, or benefits the target object, i.e. the environment (c.f. Kaiser & Shimoda, 1999). Given these considerations, psychological ownership could be able to tackle all of the barriers for pro-environmental behaviors identified here. The remaining crucial question asks how to increase psychological ownership for the environment.

How can we increase psychological ownership for the environment?

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For feelings of ownership to evolve, an individual needs to make certain key experiences. In particular, three routes have been hypothesized as essential (Pierce et al., 2003). Any of these routes may lead to the development of psychological ownership. First and linking back to psychological ownership’s potential to combat a lack of selfefficacy, the perception of control over a target facilitates its appropriation. The more control over a target can be exercised, the more ownership towards it will be felt. Second, the extent to which an individual comes to intimately know an object determines how much he / she will feel that it is “his / hers”. Hence, the more information an individual has about a target, the more likely it is to become “his / hers”. Third, personal investment into an object fosters psychological ownership. The more time, money, or energy a person puts into an object, the more likely she / he will become a psychological owner. Single and even imagined experience following these routes may result in some degree of psychological ownership (Kamleitner, 2011; Kamleitner & Feuchtl, 2015; Spears & Yazdanparast, 2014). Translated to the context of the environment, this means that any perceived increase in control over the environment, any perceived increase in knowledge about the environment, and any personal investment that people perceive to make into the environment, may help to instigate some sense of ownership for it. Which of these three routes is most fruitful in instigating psychological ownership is often determined by the objects themselves and their characteristics (Baxter et al., 2015a; Pierce et al., 2003). Some specifically defining characteristic of the environment are that is it huge, omnipresent, and ubiquitous. Because of its omnipresence, it encompasses many material facets. One can interact with parts of the natural environment by touching or looking at a tree, the stones in a river, or sand on the beach, but never with the natural environment in its entirety. Its omnipresence offers a base to determine how well consumers can travel the three routes to psychological ownership (Baxter, Aurisicchio, & Childs, 2015b). The first two routes – control and self-investment – are 11


active routes. This means that following these routes, individuals ‘do something’ to the target. They control it or they put something into it, without the object necessarily being actively involved. For example, a person may intertwine the twigs of a shrub to form a plait. The last route – intimate knowledge – is a rather passive route. Individuals do not actively do something to or with the target. Rather, they tend to ‘get something’ from the target, usually this is information that is gathered about or communicated by the target to the individual (Baxter et al., 2015b). For example, a person observes how the environment changes across the seasons. In case of the environment, its omnipresence makes it difficult to follow one of the active routes. Active influence is limited to small parts of the natural environment – like tending one’s own garden, or keeping one’s home town clean -- but can never encompass the entire natural environment. A more comprehensive approach may be possible via the route of knowledge. A given person can (be made to) feel knowledgeable about the environment via several mechanisms. This perception of knowledge could increase feelings of ownership for the environment and, finally, result in more pro-environmental behavior. Nowadays, knowledge can be gathered and transferred about almost everything to almost everyone. Especially when it comes to the environment, a target object of public interest, knowledge is widely available. As a result, knowledge about the environment could be most promising in instigating psychological ownership for the environment, perceived responsibility, and, thus, proenvironmental behavior. This suggestion, however, still leaves ample room for interpretation. Knowledge is a rather vague concept that can be about a variety of aspects of the environment but also about how to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors (Frick, Kaiser, & Wilson, 2004). Moreover, it can be actual knowledge or perceived knowledge (Brucks, 1985; Carlson, Vincent, Hardesty, & Bearden, 2009). Given the literature on psychological ownership, we suspect that perceived knowledge (Pierce et al., 2003) about the environment itself (cf. Brown

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et al., 2013) may be most powerful in bringing about psychological ownership for the environment.

Conclusion and Discussion Calls for more sustainability, in particular in the context of the natural environment, have been long standing and are gaining in urgency. Many researchers addressed the issues of why individuals do not behave sustainably, what processes underlie these actions, and how to alter them for the sake of a more sustainable development (for an overview see van der Linden, Maibach, & Leiserowitz, 2015). Among the suggestions made thus far are appeals to social norms (Goldstein, Cialdini, & Griskevicius, 2008; White & Simpson, 2013), personal norms (Schwartz, 1977), personal values (Stern & Dietz, 1994), and suggestions to factually enforce some pro-environmental behaviors. Though effective in some cases, most of these approaches struggle to overcome all of the identified barriers (i.e., lack of perceived efficacy, lack of perceived responsibility, lack of personal relevance, personal costs, multiplicity of behaviors). In particular, the fact that truly sustainable behavior necessarily entails a broad range of very different acts and decisions remains a challenge. We propose that psychological ownership can overcome all of the barriers to sustainable behavior. At a first look this may seem paradoxical. Materialism and by extension ownership have also been diagnosed (Kilbourne & Pickett, 2008) to lie at the heart of the problem. What we suggest is that the mechanisms giving rise to the problem can also be used in bringing about a solution. Rather than instilling a sense of ownership for material goods, we suggest to contemplate ways in which consumers may develop a feeling of ownership for the environment. By feeling ownership, a target accrues meaning and becomes more important for the individual self. Behavior towards the target becomes intrinsically motivated and fueled by a sense of

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responsibility. In turn, the perception of costs and benefits entailed in this behavior likely shifts in favor of sustainability. While there may be many ways to instill a sense of psychological ownership for the environment, we suspect that making individuals feel as if they know the environment might be one of the most promising ways to do so. Clearly, future research is needed to identify the ways in which people can come to feel intimately knowledgeable about a construct as omnipresent and ubiquitous as the environment. Future research could also focus on verifying whether psychological ownership is in fact able to overcome all of the barriers commonly lying behind the attitude behavior gap. Though it theoretically holds the power to do so, there is little research providing actual empirical evidence. One way to gain a deeper understanding of the actual processes at play would be to juxtapose the role of ownership perceptions with regard to different targets that are in need of more sustainably treatment. In this chapter, we focused on the entire environment as the target object. Theoretically, the suggested approach should enhance the sustainable treatment of all targets and systems. Another relevant question yet to be addressed asks how the nature of the target affects which routes towards psychological ownership are most effective. Depending on the actual ownership target, its scope and level of abstraction, routes of appropriation beyond knowledge should become more viable. Perceived control over or personal investment into the target might become more promising as targets can be handled in their entirety. Though psychological ownership clearly has the potential to increase sustainable behaviors, it is necessary to note that these implications derive from the sense of obligation and responsibility entailed in ownership. Ownership also conveys rights to a target. Theoretically, these rights include the right to destroy the target and the right to exclude others from the target (Snare, 1972). People who feel a strong sense of ownership for the environment may aim to exclude others from using the natural good. Depending on their experiences with the 14


environment, they may even feel more right to the environment than they admit others to have. In fact, the long-standing human practice of claiming specific pieces of land is nothing but the execution of individual ownership over graspable and individually appropriated parts of the natural environment (cf. Burghardt, 1973). Most individuals will hopefully recognize that to feel ownership for the environment at large means to feel co-ownership with all other inhabitants of our planet. Though it may affect behavior less strongly than individual ownership, collective ownership curbs the destructive elements ownership otherwise entails. That is because co-ownership breeds responsibility not only towards the target but also towards the co-owners (Kamleitner & Rabinovich, 2010). To date we know very little about how people actually conceptualize and act on collective psychological ownership (for some potential ways of how this might play out see for example Kamleitner, 2014). A better understanding of collective psychological ownership will help determine the extent to which psychological ownership can act as a remedy for one of the biggest problems human kind currently faces.

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