Abstract Monetary rewards are effective for promoting environmental protection. But can protecting the environment for financial reasons result in durable increases in people's inherent motivation to protect the environment—that is, their environmental attitude? With this research, we aimed to experimentally test the long-term efficacy of financial incentive/reward interventions. We randomly assigned a sample of 336 (mostly) students to either of two conditions. Participants in the treatment condition were offered a financial reward for choosing vegetarian lunches. As expected, we found that the monetary reward increased the proportion of vegetarian lunches regardless of students' preexisting environmental attitude levels. The following week, after the financial reward was discontinued, environmental attitude continued to account for the proportion of vegetarian meals, whereas the previous receipt of a financial reward no longer had an effect. Thus, the long-term efficacy of monetary rewards, at least under the conditions of this research, seems questionable.

中文翻译：

---

长期环境保护的经济奖励

摘要 货币奖励对促进环境保护是有效的。但是，出于经济原因保护环境是否会导致人们保护环境的内在动机（即他们的环保态度）持续增强？通过这项研究，我们旨在通过实验测试财务激励/奖励干预的长期有效性。我们将 336 名（主要是）学生的样本随机分配到两种情况中的任何一种。治疗条件下的参与者因选择素食午餐而获得经济奖励。正如预期的那样，我们发现无论学生先前存在的环境态度水平如何，金钱奖励都会增加素食午餐的比例。接下来的一周，在停止经济奖励后，环保态度继续占素食餐的比例，而之前收到的经济奖励不再有影响。因此，至少在本研究的条件下，金钱奖励的长期效力似乎值得怀疑。