Understanding the Environmental Attitude-Behaviour Gap: The Moderating Role of Dispositional Mindfulness
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
It is well known that pro-environmental attitudes do not always lead to pro-environmental behaviors. This study attempts to explain this gap by looking at the role of mindfulness. The authors found that certain facets of mindfulness can moderate the relationship between attitudes and behavior.
This study was very well written, and clearly lays out the methods and findings. I believe that it will be very useful for practitioners looking at ways to promote pro-environmental behaviors. There could be some very interesting future studies testing interventions that use different mindfulness practices.
I did have one minor comment for a mistake that I found. Table 1 and Table 2 are the same. They both show the correlations between psychological variables. The table with correlations between demographics and psychological variables is missing.
Author Response
1) I did have one minor comment for a mistake that I found. Table 1 and Table 2 are the same. They both show the correlations between psychological variables. The table with correlations between demographics and psychological variables is missing.
We wish to thank the reviewer for pointing out this mistake. We have updated the manuscript with the correct Table.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
Thanks for giving me a chance to read this manuscript, “Understanding the Environmental Attitude-Behaviour Gap: The Moderating Role of Dispositional Mindfulness”. The current paper conducted a cross-sectional study to test the hypothesis of a role of dispositional mindfulness in explaining the phenomenon and found that higher levels of dispositional mindfulness, measured via the Five Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), are related to a higher tendency to perform pro-environmental behaviour, and that the Observing facet of the construct would predict higher pro-environmental behaviour scores.
This is an interesting and significant topic in the field of environmental psychology. However, there are minor issues in the current manuscript that should be carefully addressed to be further considered.
1. Literature
· Authors are advised to separate the part of the introduction into the introduction and literature review.
· Authors are advised to explicitly describe the contribution of the current study.
2. Method
· Authors are advised to explain why a convenience sample was utilized in this study, though it is briefly discussed in the limitation. Detailed and solid evidence should be added to strengthen your sampling strategy.
3. Language
· There are some typos and language issues which should be carefully addressed. For example, “self-regulation skills would contribute to reduce the environmental attitude-behaviour gap.” To “self-regulation skills would contribute to reducing the environmental attitude-behaviour gap.”
To sum up, I personally like this paper very much. However, the problems should be addressed in order to be further considered. Hope these suggestions help.
Author Response
1) Authors are advised to separate the part of the introduction into the introduction and literature review.
Many thanks for this suggestion. We have separated the Introduction paragraphs from the paragraphs detailing the theoretical background of our study (“Literature review”; see line 47) in the revised manuscript.
2) Authors are advised to explicitly describe the contribution of the current study.
To address this comment, we have created a paragraph called “Current Study” and reformulated the manuscript to make the purpose of our study clearer and its contribution to the current literature more explicit.
3) Authors are advised to explain why a convenience sample was utilized in this study, though it is briefly discussed in the limitation. Detailed and solid evidence should be added to strengthen your sampling strategy.
To address this comment, we have provided a detailed explanation of our sampling method and specified the reason of our choice; we further included the power analysis (see from line 112 to 123).
4) There are some typos and language issues which should be carefully addressed. For example, “self-regulation skills would contribute to reduce the environmental attitude-behaviour gap.” To “self-regulation skills would contribute to reducing the environmental attitude-behaviour gap.”
Many thanks for this comment. We have revised the entire text to correct typos and small grammatical errors. We hope that the manuscript is now correct.
Reviewer 3 Report
Authors can improve state of the art section by several citation of pro-environmental behavior
There was several additional comments for manuscript review ID: 2257190
Author Response
1) Authors can improve state of the art section by several citation of pro-environmental behavior.
We would like to thank the Reviewer for this suggestion. We expanded the cited literature referring to the environmental attitude-behaviour gap (see from line 40 to 45).
2) Please explain in details about the urgency of this research based on several citations from another country, such as from Asian countries and European country, the difference of environmental attitudes can be specified in the introduction.
To address this point, we have written a new subsection explaining the purpose of our study and included in our manuscript citations of studies which have investigated the issue of the environmental behaviour gap in different regions (i.e. Australia, Asia, Canada).
3) Author can expand the method section with specific steps with flowchart.
We thank the Reviewer for this suggestion which we have carefully considered. Nevertheless, we have chosen not to include a flowchart because we feared it might be redundant for a cross-sectional study. However, we created a new subsection with the procedure and further revised the text in order to make clearer the sequence of events in the study. We changed the numeration of the subsequent sections accordingly.
4) There was a sentence "The current study is not without limitations. First, results have been collected using 287 a relatively small convenience sample, potentially hindering the generalisability of our 288 results", could you please explain another limitation of this research?
To address this comment, we included in the Discussion section one extra limitation linked with our sampling method, i.e. a reduced replicability of the study.
