June 28th, 2019, PhD student Mykolas Simas Poškus defended his dissertation: "Predicting and Promoting Adolescents’ Pro-Environmental Behavior in Different Big Five Trait Clusters."

The dissertation investigates youth’s pro-environmental behaviors through a holistic person-oriented perspective and adopts evolutionary psychology as a unifying metatheory for understanding and explaining behavior.

The aim of the dissertation was to investigate how predictive models of pro-environmental behavior function in different groups of individuals clustered by their personality traits and how evolutionarily tailored persuasive normative stimuli affect individuals in these groups.

The dissertation concludes that: the classical model of the Theory of Planned Behavior functions sufficiently well without additional expansions; individuals with different patterns of Big Five personality traits form beliefs about pro-environmental behaviors differently and therefore predictive models function differently for these clusters as well. Also evolutionarily tailored normative stimuli are effective in promoting pro-environmental intentions, but their effectiveness is different for individuals with different patterns of Big Five personality traits.

The conventional correlational approaches are not sufficient enough to fully understand the role of innate traits in pro-environmental behavior because traits do not function independently of one another.