Measuring pro-environmental orientation: Testing and building scales

A pro-environmental orientation is theorized to be an important predictor of public and private pro-environmental behavior. As such, measuring pro-environmental orientation is an important component in environmental psychology and politics research. In this paper, we assess two well-established scales, the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) and the Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS), on how well they measure the underlying construct of pro-environmental orientation. The items of these scales offer strong face validity, but mainly from a politically left tradition, which may reduce validity among political conservatives. Previous attempts at scale validation have mostly focused on predictive validity with pro-environmental behavior and have not tested how the items measure the latent construct itself. Additionally, we present a novel measure of environmental orientation using diverse moral language to avoid ideological framing: the Moral Environmentalism Scale (MES). The MES is validated here using MTurk workers (n = 448), and a more representative sample from Survey Sampling International (n = 499). In these validation studies, the MES moderated the relationship between party identification and behavior while CNS and NEP did not. Item-level analyses of the MES scale using two measurement periods revealed robust item characteristics. Seen together, all three scales offer a more complete picture of pro-environmental orientation measurement validity and inform scale selection for future research. All study materials, data, and analysis code are available at https://osf.io/d4ume/?view_only=05d5cfb5a76a4f11b339290913da96f6. •Prominent measures of environmental orientation likely suffer from confounds with liberal environmentalism.•A scale composed of diverse moral language and item content measures a wider breadth of the environmental attitude continuum.•This novel scale, the Moral Environmentalism Scale, is shown to have convergent validity.•A attitude-behavior gap exists and researchers should continue work on improving measures of environmental orientations.