The Impact of Beliefs, Motives and Worldviews on Social Acceptance of...

The increasing spotlight on renewable energy technologies (RET) over the past decades has brought a fickle issue regarding the actual deployment of such technologies to the foreground: social acceptance of RET. Existing research has investigated social-psychological characteristics as predictors but has largely ignored the risk perception literature. As a first effort to integrate existing risk perception scholarship the study presented here, is aimed at advancing our understanding of psychographic correlates of acceptance, with a particular focus on the cultural worldviews individuals subscribe to as predictors of acceptance. In this paper, we examine social acceptance of RET at the local scale and investigate the respective predictive power of various constructs. We study a nationally representative sample of 1000 respondents with a mean age of 45 years (SD = 14.0) and 49 % women. The following variables are examined: Adherence to individualistic/hierarchical and communitarian/egalitarian worldviews, participants’ belief in RET, individuals’ motives to adopt renewables in general, socio-demographic variables and as a dependent compound variable acceptance of two forms of RET. The data are analysed by multiple linear regression, with the final regression model accounting for 29% of total variance. RET belief (b = .38, p = .00) yields the highest standardized regression weight followed by RE motives (b = .23, p = .00) RET scepticism (b = -.10, p = .00), Age (b = -.08, p = .01), Communitarianism/Egalitarianism (b = .07, p = .04) and gender (b = -.06, p = .03). The discussion section demonstrates that attitudinal and more abstract psychological constructs make a valuable contribution in predicting individuals’ acceptance of RET developments. We further elaborate on the inconclusive findings regarding the predictive value of cultural worldviews and discuss the ambiguous results regarding the measurement scales' reliability and factor solutions, which suggest that the here applied cultural worldview scales do not adequately suit an Austrian cultural context. Leading on from these findings, suggestions for communication and engagement strategies during the critical stages of a RET project are presented.