Associations of the five-factor personality traits with environmental citizenship behavior of youth in a Nigerian university community

The joint influence of personality traits, age and gender on environmental citizenship behavior (ECB) is relatively unknown among youth. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the independent and joint influence of the Big Five traits, age and gender on the three dimensions of ECB of students in a Nigerian university community.

A quantitative cross-sectional survey was adopted to collect data from 290 students in a Nigerian university.

The findings show that personality traits of openness and agreeableness were more related with eco-initiatives and eco-helping. Likewise, traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness were more associated with eco-civic engagement. Age was also consistently associated with the three dimensions. The Big Five traits, age and gender also have joint influence on the dimensions of ECB.

This is a self-reported survey, which limits the ability to draw any firm conclusions regarding the causal relationship between the study variables. Future research needs to consider other methods suitable for establishing causal relationship.

The findings imply that knowing the associations of personality traits, age and gender with environmental actions can help organizers of environmental initiatives to target their recruitment messages toward youth who might be pre-disposed to taking environmental actions, and also consider alternative actions that might appeal to their counterparts.

The originality of this paper lies in combining personality traits, age and gender to gain a better understanding of the three dimensions of ECB in a student sample against monolithic approach of authors of previous studies.