Cognitive Abilities, Personality, and Sustainable Attitudes and Behavior

Climate change demands urgent action, yet individual engagement in sustainable behaviors remains inconsistent. To better understand the factors that promote sustainable behaviors, we conducted two studies (N₁ = 280, N₂ = 973) examining how political orientation, personality traits, reasoning ability, social-emotional-behavioral skills, and complex problem solving relate to sustainable attitudes and behaviors in U.S. adults. Using structural equation modeling, we found that openness to experience was the strongest predictor, alongside liberal political orientation and self-perceived social engagement and innovation skills. Unexpectedly, both reasoning ability and complex problem solving showed consistent negative associations with sustainability outcomes, challenging assumptions that cognitive abilities universally facilitate adaptive behavior. Psychological characteristics together explained approximately one-third of variance in both sustainable attitudes and behaviors. Personality traits dominated explanation of attitudes, while behaviors emerged from more balanced contributions across psychological domains, with social-emotional skills providing meaningful incremental validity beyond established predictors. These findings demonstrate that personality psychology provides crucial insights for understanding environmental engagement, revealing that adaptive social-emotional competencies and personality characteristics are more strongly associated with sustainability than cognitive abilities.