Exploring the Norm Activation Model Together with External Influences and Environmental Moral Values: The Case of Guayaquil, Ecuador

Understanding how to promote more sustainable behaviors (not only including recycling but also going beyond) across various contexts remains a key crucial challenge for policymakers and researchers. The norm activation model (NAM) provides valuable frameworks for determining the different psycho-social factors that influence different kinds of pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs). The subjects were 1210 people approached in the immediacies of public places from the city of Guayaquil. Accordingly, this study used external influences, environmental moral values, and NAM to construct one motivation-value-intention-behavior theoretical model for the systematic illustration of the most acknowledged psycho-social constructs applied to a third-world developing country in Latin America. With the help of bootstrapping analyses through structural equation modeling, this investigation intends to cover the existing research gap for Latin American cities with one integrated research model, NAM. We additionally used external influences and environmental moral values as strengthening boosters for this model in a developing third-world city like Guayaquil. The research also analyzed a total of 18 hypotheses, to establish the complicated relationships among external influences, environmental moral values, personal norms, awareness of consequences, and ascription of responsibility, and pro-environmental behaviors such as recycler, avoider, activist, green consumer, and waste preventer.