Beyond Self-reports: A Call for More Behavior in Environmental Psychology

When environmental psychologists collect information about behavior, they can pursue different objectives. They may seek to measure1 characteristics of particular behaviors that naturally occur in the lives of people, such as the frequency of meat consumption or the time spent in natural environments. Alternatively, researchers may want to record responses to experimentally arranged situations to study how behavior varies as a function of contextual changes or psychological manipulations. Yet another objective may entail using behavioral information to infer psychological characteristics of persons, such as their environmental attitude or connectedness to nature. In all three cases, self-reports seem to be the most common source of data in environmental psychology (Lange et al., 2018; Steg & Vlek, 2009). While we are not arguing for a general abandonment of self-reports, we believe that overreliance on this data collection method limits the conclusiveness, generalizability, and practical impact of research in environmental psychology. In this letter, we highlight some ways to overcome these limitations.