The temporal tunnel: time poverty diminishes pro-environmental behavior by reducing future time orientation

Summary

While pro-environmental behaviors are essential for addressing mounting environmental challenges, many individuals fail to engage in them. Understanding the psychological barriers that inhibit such actions is therefore crucial. This research introduces time poverty—the subjective feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time—as a key factor that undermines pro-environmental behavior by diminishing future time orientation. Six studies (total N = 39,816) examined these hypotheses using a multi-method approach. Studies 1 (N = 31,950, UK) and 2 (N = 6,635, China) first established the foundational negative relationship between time poverty and pro-environmental behavior across diverse cultural contexts using proxy indicators. Study 3 examined the semantic association between time poverty and pro-environmental behaviors in natural language using the Fill-Mask Association Test (FMAT) with large language models. Study 4 (N = 300) experimentally manipulated time poverty and demonstrated that high time poverty reduced pro-environmental behavior, an effect mediated by future time orientation. Study 5 (N = 481) employed a mediation-by-manipulation design to establish causal evidence for this mediating pathway. Finally, Study 6 (pre-registered; N = 450) tested an intervention strategy: framing pro-environmental behaviors as having low perceived time opportunity cost effectively increased pro-environmental engagement among time-poor individuals. Our findings reveal time poverty as a critical psychological barrier to sustainable action and highlight a practical pathway to promote environmental engagement in increasingly time-scarce societies.