The Role of Psychological Proximity and Social Ties Influence in Promoting a Social Media Recycling Campaign

As environmental threats intensify rapidly across the globe, understanding how to promote public engagement in pro-environmental actions to address these threats is imperative. Contributing to the effort, we examined two influencers of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, psychological proximity and social ties influence, in the context of a recycling campaign through Facebook. We administered an online survey to a random sample of 434 U.S. Millennials. Results showed that psychological proximity (i.e. cognitive and emotional proximities) predicted positive attitudes toward recycling, intentions to like, share, and comment on posts of recycling-related social media campaigns, and to engage in recycling behaviors. The perceived influence of social ties (i.e. strong ties and weak ties) moderated the relationship between psychological proximity and attitudes toward recycling as well as offline recycling intentions. The results revealed that Millennials who perceive a stronger influence of their social ties, both strong and weak ties, rely less on their psychological proximity to determine their attitudes and offline behavioral intentions, indicating the critical influence of social ties. Theoretical and practical implications are suggested.