Pro-Environmental Attitudes Correlate with Personality Traits More Strongly Than Typical Single-Method Studies Suggest: A Large Multi-Rater, Multi-Trait, Multi-Sample Study

Relatively stable personality traits shape people’s motivations and attitudes, and their potential effect on pro-environmental attitudes and resulting behaviours can accumulate over time. However, narrow personality traits—nuances that tend to provide stronger and more refined associations with various outcomes—have received little attention in relation to pro-environmental attitudes. Furthermore, research has almost exclusively focused on self-reports that are prone to biases. This suggests that the associations between personality traits and pro-environmental attitudes have likely been underestimated. We collected participants' self- and informant-reports of narrow personality nuances and broad Big Five domains from three samples (Estonian, N = 20,926; Russian, N = 762; English, N = 600). This allowed us to estimate their true correlation (rtrue) with and predictive accuracy (rtruepred) for pro-environmental attitudes, while controlling for single-method, occasion-specific, and random errors and estimating the findings’ generalizability. The rtrues were higher than self-reports-based correlations, and nuances had larger effect sizes than domains. In the largest sample, the Openness (rtrue = .35) and Agreeableness domains (rtrue = .27) had the highest rtrues with pro-environmental attitudes. However, a range of nuances had even stronger rtrues , primarily those reflecting progressive views, care for other people, and appreciation of art. The combined predictive accuracy of nuances for pro-environmental attitudes reached nearly rtruepred = .60, even with only three “top” nuances; the domains’ predictive accuracy was lower (rtruepred = .50). The findings replicated well across samples and suggest that pro-environmental attitudes are linked with personality traits more strongly and in more nuanced ways than previously thought.