Green citizen or minimalist? A new scale measures your environmental personality

Plenty of surveys ask people what they do for the environment, such as whether they recycle, cycle to work or buy eco-friendly products. A new scale developed by Shayan Shaikh and Nicholas Ashill takes a different tack. It asks not what people do, but how consistently environmental concern sits at the centre of their decisions, treating that concern as a stable trait rather than a set of habits shaped by circumstance.

Across six studies involving more than 1,800 participants, the researchers built and tested what they call the Pro-Environmental Orientation, or PEO, scale. They began with interviews with sustainability experts and members of the public, generated a large pool of candidate items, and used statistical techniques to reduce these to 15 items capturing three facets.

Green Citizenship covers support for organisations, leaders and policies aligned with environmental responsibility. Domestic Mindfulness covers attentiveness to energy and resource use in everyday household routines. Minimalism covers a preference for simplicity and restrained consumption.

These three facets were not merely separate habits. They loaded onto a single higher-order factor, which suggests they reflect one coherent disposition rather than three unrelated tendencies. People high in PEO also tended to score higher on connectedness to nature and on general agreeableness, supporting the idea that the scale captures something real. At the same time, PEO was statistically distinguishable from the broad Big Five personality traits, from narcissism and from the tendency to give socially desirable answers, so it is not simply repackaging existing measures.

The scale also predicted outcomes that matter beyond the questionnaire. People scoring higher in PEO reported greater life satisfaction, psychological wellbeing, social connectedness and a more communal orientation towards others. A later study showed the scale held up reasonably well when the same people were tested again after a delay, and further analysis indicated it worked consistently across different demographic groups, an important check for any measure intended for wide use.

Why does this matter? Most existing environmental measures track specific behaviours, and those behaviours are heavily shaped by circumstance, such as whether someone can afford solar panels or has kerbside recycling. Someone renting a small flat with no recycling collection might score low on a behaviour checklist while still prioritising the environment whenever a real choice arises. A dispositional measure such as PEO aims to capture that underlying orientation independently of what happens to be available, which could help researchers comparing environmental attitudes across countries, income levels or infrastructure, and organisations trying to identify who will respond to sustainability messaging regardless of situational barriers.

As with any new psychometric tool, the scale will need testing beyond the UK-based Prolific samples used here before anyone can be confident it travels well across cultures. Even so, it offers a promising way to ask a different question, one about who people consistently are when the environment is at stake rather than only what they happen to do for it.

Shaikh, S., & Ashill, N. (2026). Development and validation of the pro-environmental orientation scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 262, Article 113969. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2026.113969