Social norms and tourists’ pro-environmental behaviors: Do ethical evaluation and Chinese cultural values matter?

Tourists’ pro-environmental behaviors are a prerequisite to the sustainability of tourist sites. Drawing from normative, ethical and cultural value perspective, this research aims to investigate the influences of social norms (e.g., injunctive norm and descriptive norm) on tourists’ pro-environmental behaviors. This study further explores the mechanism and the boundary condition of the effects by testing the mediating effect of ethical evaluation (e.g., deontological evaluation and teleological evaluation) and the moderating effect of Chinese cultural values (e.g., collectivism and human-to-nature orientation). The survey data collected from 537 tourists showed that injunctive norm and descriptive norm pose no significant direct influence on tourists’ pro-environmental behaviors but an indirect one via deontological evaluation and teleological evaluation. That is, ethical evaluation mediates the relationships between social norms and tourists’ pro-environmental behaviors. Moreover, this research revealed that collectivism and human-to-nature orientation positively moderate the relationships between social norms and tourists’ pro-environmental behaviors.