Measuring pro-environmental orientation: Testing and building scales

A pro-environmental orientation is theorized to be an important predictor of public and private behavior. As such, measuring component in environmental psychology politics research. In this paper, we assess two well-established scales, the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Connectedness Nature Scale (CNS), on how well they measure underlying construct orientation. The items 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 predictive with behavior not tested latent itself. Additionally, present novel using diverse moral language avoid ideological framing: Moral Environmentalism (MES). MES validated here MTurk workers (n = 448), more representative sample Survey Sampling International 499). studies, moderated relationship between party identification while CNS NEP did not. Item-level analyses measurement periods revealed robust item characteristics. Seen together, all three complete picture inform selection for future All study materials, data, analysis code are available https://osf.io/d4ume/?view_only=05d5cfb5a76a4f11b339290913da96f6.