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People who practice environmentally friendly habits tend to be viewed as more desirable romantic partners than those who disregard the environment, according to new research published in Environmental Psychology Research. In the second of two online experiments, this appeal depended in part on the observer’s own outlook: individuals with stronger positive attitudes toward nature were especially drawn to eco-friendly partners for committed relationships and viewed environmentally wasteful people less favorably. The findings suggest that everyday green habits may act as social signals in dating, particularly among people who care about protecting the planet.
Pro-environmental behavior refers to everyday actions that reduce harm to the natural world or benefit it, such as sorting household recycling, driving an electric car, or avoiding disposable plastics. Beyond their ecological impact, visible green habits communicate information about a person’s character. Because sustainable routines often take extra time, effort, or money without an immediate personal payoff, observers tend to interpret them as signs of prosociality, meaning a willingness to cooperate and help others.
From an evolutionary perspective on human mating, cooperative and generous traits matter in partner selection because they suggest someone will be a supportive companion and dependable parent. Consistent with that idea, a 2021 two-part study found that shoppers described as buying sustainable products were seen as more generous and rated as more attractive for both casual and committed relationships. Similarly, a 2021 experimental study by the same two authors behind the new paper found that men and women alike rated people with eco-friendly routines as more desirable long-term partners than people who wasted resources.
Although women often place greater weight on general kindness in prospective mates than men do, those earlier studies on green habits found similar preferences across both sexes, which researchers link to the shared investment mothers and fathers make in raising children. Still, social signals do not register the same way with every audience. Outside dating, a 2021 experiment on grocery shopping indicated that buyers of low-carbon foods were viewed most favorably by observers who personally cared deeply about nature.
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Whether an onlooker’s own environmental mindset similarly shapes who they find romantically appealing had remained open. In the new study, Daniel Farrelly, a principal lecturer in psychology at the University of Worcester, and Manpal Singh Bhogal of the University of Wolverhampton used two online experiments to check the reliability of earlier findings on green habits in dating and test how an observer’s environmental attitudes shape those preferences.
“We had previously found evidence that environmentally friendly individuals are rated more desirable as potential long-term romantic partners; however, this research in the paper is the first to show that this is affected by people’s personal attitudes toward environmental issues,” Farrelly told PsyPost.
In the first experiment, the researchers recruited 140 heterosexual adults in the United Kingdom, split evenly between 70 women and 70 men aged 18 and older, via a university psychology course and social media, and posted all study materials and data publicly on the Open Science Framework. Participants first read definitions of a short-term relationship, described as a brief affair or one-night stand, and a long-term relationship, described as a committed romantic partnership.
Participants then read eight randomized descriptions of gender-neutral individuals making either environmentally friendly or unfriendly choices across four areas: recycling household waste, printing documents, driving an electric vehicle, and using fireworks. Three topics came from the authors’ 2021 work and the firework scenario was newly added to broaden the behaviors tested. In the recycling scenario, for example, one person routinely spent time sorting metal, plastic, and cardboard waste as a worthwhile habit, while another did not want to spend time sorting trash.
For each profile, participants rated the person’s desirability as both a short-term and a long-term partner on a five-point scale from 1 (very undesirable) to 5 (very desirable). With 140 participants, the sample was large enough to reliably detect small overall differences between eco-friendly and wasteful profiles, though less suited to picking up subtle differences between men and women.
Participants in the first experiment rated individuals with eco-friendly habits as substantially more desirable partners overall than those who made wasteful choices. Contrary to the researchers’ expectations and their 2021 results, however, eco-friendly individuals were not rated detectably higher for long-term relationships than for brief flings; the difference between those ratings was not statistically significant.
Relationship length instead mattered when judging wasteful habits: individuals who disregarded the environment were rated as more desirable for a casual short-term fling than for a committed long-term partnership. Differences between men’s and women’s ratings were not statistically significant.
The second experiment directly repeated the design of the authors’ 2021 study, which included neutral comparison profiles, and added a measure of participants’ own environmental attitudes. It recruited an independent sample of 133 heterosexual adults in the United Kingdom, consisting of 103 women and 30 men with an average age of about 26, through university courses, social media, and survey platforms.
Participants first completed the 24-item Environmental Attitudes Inventory, rating their agreement on a nine-point scale with statements about enjoying nature and conserving resources, such as liking trips to forests or fields. They then rated short-term and long-term desirability across the 12 scenarios from the authors’ 2021 study: four eco-friendly profiles (recycling, reusing drink containers, printing documents, and electric cars), four wasteful counterparts, and four neutral control profiles featuring everyday details like car color, lunch choice, office habits, or calling a coin toss. Those neutral descriptions gave the researchers an ordinary baseline for comparing the green and wasteful profiles.
When the researchers statistically accounted for participants’ own environmental attitude scores, the overall difference across the three profile types was not statistically significant on its own, whereas leaving attitude scores out of the model did yield an overall difference. In the authors’ reading, this suggests that how much an observer cares about the environment accounts for a substantial share of how they judge green versus wasteful habits in prospective partners.
Even with attitude scores factored in, both men and women rated eco-friendly characters higher than wasteful ones, though comparisons with the neutral baseline differed by sex. Women rated eco-friendly individuals higher than neutral characters and wasteful individuals lower than neutral characters, whereas for men, differences from the neutral baseline were not statistically significant.
Comparing the sexes directly, women rated eco-friendly profiles higher than men did, men rated wasteful profiles higher than women did, and the difference between men’s and women’s ratings of neutral characters was not statistically significant. Overall differences between short-term and long-term ratings across the profile types were also not statistically significant. Because men made up fewer than a quarter of this second sample, the authors caution that these gender findings are preliminary.
Participants’ personal attitudes toward the environment were modestly linked to how they rated the profiles, in ways that depended on relationship type. People with stronger pro-environmental attitudes rated eco-friendly characters higher specifically as long-term partners, while rating wasteful characters lower for both casual flings and committed relationships, especially long-term ones. The authors suggest that favoring green partners may extend a person’s environmental attitudes into mate choice, as those who view conservation as a cooperative trait are more inclined to want it in a committed partner, though they caution against drawing strong conclusions across different measures of environmentalism.
That the attitude links were strongest for committed partnerships came as little surprise to Farrelly. “It fit very well with previous research that shows altruistic traits are more desirable for long-term relationships, so it was good to see that this is where the main effects of attitudes to the environment were found,” he noted.
“It shows that people’s perceptions and attitudes need to be considered when we are exploring what psychological traits we find desirable in long-term relationships,” Farrelly explained. “This can further influence the desirability of such traits, particularly when there may be some inconsistencies in how the traits are perceived. For example, in our study, it might mean that individuals with a very weak attitude to environmental issues actually find environmentally friendly individuals less desirable? This might mean that something that has been shown to be desired (such as environmentalism) is more subjective than other traits in mate choice.”
These findings align with an online experiment with heterosexual participants co-authored by Farrelly, which found that people contributed more effort to a shared charity task when paired with hypothetical opposite-sex partners than with same-sex partners, especially when opposite-sex interactions came first. Although that study examined whether people actively display more altruism, or unselfish helpfulness, around potential mates rather than how observers rate the romantic desirability of green behaviors, both are consistent with the idea that prosocial actions serve as signals in mate choice.
The link between observers’ environmental views and their partner ratings is also consistent with an earlier study of men’s and women’s mate preferences, which found that alongside sex differences in valuing physical attractiveness, conscientiousness, and earning potential, people generally prefer partners with similar personality traits and ideological values. That earlier work assessed direct ratings of broad partner traits whereas the new experiments tested desirability using descriptions of specific pro-environmental behaviors, yet both point to the appeal of shared values in prospective mates.
For everyday daters, the findings connect eco-friendly habits to broader qualities people look for when choosing a life partner. “There’s a lot of evidence that prosocial traits are very desirable in potential long-term partners, as this shows that the actor is likely to be a very good partner and possible parent to any shared offspring,” Farrelly told PsyPost. “This also extends to applied forms of prosociality, such as environmentalism, and particularly so when we consider these environmental acts more positively because of our own views and attitudes.”
There are a few caveats to keep in mind when interpreting these results. Participants evaluated brief, gender-neutral text blurbs that isolated one everyday habit from real-world factors like physical appearance, humor, or face-to-face chemistry, and their ratings captured hypothetical preferences rather than actual dating choices. Reading contrasting green and wasteful profiles in sequence, and completing the environmental attitudes questionnaire right before judging the profiles in the second experiment, may also have nudged participants to weigh environmental cues more heavily or match their ratings to the views they had just reported.
Sample size and demographics also limit how broadly the findings apply. With 140 and 133 participants, both experiments had modest samples that could miss subtle interplay among relationship length, habits, and gender, and both included only heterosexual adults in the United Kingdom, mostly university undergraduates, leaving open how these preferences look across other sexual orientations, age groups, and cultures.
Rather than viewing green behavior as a guaranteed advantage across the dating pool, Farrelly cautioned that attraction depends on the observer’s perspective as well. “We should not ignore how our own views and attitudes may shape what we find desirable in a partner,” he added.
To build on this work, the authors propose testing how eco-friendly habits interact with other attractive traits like physical appearance, and exploring whether other forms of environmentalism, such as activism or deeper ecological values, carry similar weight in dating.
“We are now looking to see if potential desirability as a long-term partner makes people behave more desirably,” Farrelly said. “We have shown in our previous work in 2021 that people self-report more environmental behaviors in the presence of potential partners, so we are now seeing if it leads to changes in actual environmental behavior. We think this is very important as any psychology research that can lead to potential interventions must show that they change behavior (rather than self-reported behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, etc.). After all, it is only changing behavior that will reduce the effects of climate change!”
The study, “The roles of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour in mate choice,” was authored by Daniel Farrelly and Manpal Singh Bhogal.
