Using the social identity model of pro-environmental behavior to predict support for the adoption of solar panels

Solar panels promise to provide clean energy with much fewer environmental impacts than traditional energy sources. The adoption of solar panels may be practiced on an individual level, a community level, or even at a national level through corporate or government actions. While extant literature has observed that perceptions of monetary value, house features, and environmental benefit predict the use of solar panels, less is known about how social factors relate to the use of solar panels. The Social Identity Model of Pro-Environmental Action (SIMPEA; Fritsche et al. in Psychol Rev 125(2):245-269, 2018) hypothesizes that ingroup identification, along with collective efficacy and perceived norms of the ingroup, predict pro-environmental behavior. We applied this prediction to solar panels as a new context for SIMPEA and tested this hypothesis with a survey measuring participants' support for the adoption of solar panels in community and national contexts. The study revealed a predicted two-way interaction between identification and norms, but there was no evidence of the three-way interaction that was predicted by SIMPEA.