In an exploratory study published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Sára Laníková and Vojtěch Zíka of Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Czechia, set out to test whether inequality aversion is associated with pro-environmental attitudes. Their starting point is conceptually elegant. Environmental protection is, in many ways, a distributional problem. Climate change hits the poorest hardest while being driven disproportionately by the wealthiest, and environmental policies such as carbon taxes raise well-documented questions about who pays and who benefits. If concern about unfair distributions of outcomes is a stable feature of a person’s social preferences, it is plausible that the same disposition colors how that person thinks about the unequal burdens and benefits of environmental degradation.

The researchers distinguish between two faces of inequality aversion, following the influential framework developed by economists Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt in 1999. Advantageous inequality aversion describes discomfort when one is better off than others, the guilt of the favored party in an unequal split. Disadvantageous inequality aversion describes discomfort when one is worse off, the resentment of the disfavored party, sometimes described as envy. These two dispositions are related but distinct, and the study treats them separately rather than collapsing them into a single fairness score. The distinction matters because the two forms can pull behavior in different directions and because prior work suggests they may have different cognitive and emotional underpinnings.

To measure environmental attitudes, the team used the New Ecological Paradigm scale, or NEP, the most widely deployed instrument in the field. First introduced by Riley Dunlap and Kent Van Liere in 1978 and revised in 2000, the NEP assesses endorsement of a worldview in which humans are embedded in, and dependent upon, the natural environment, rather than standing above it. Higher NEP scores indicate stronger pro-environmental attitudes. Inequality aversion, by contrast, was measured through self-reported survey items capturing how much respondents dislike being ahead of others or behind them in distributive situations. The data were collected in December 2024 from participants in a decision-making study conducted in the Czech Republic, with informed consent obtained from all participants and the data stored and published anonymously. The datasets and the R scripts used for the analyses are publicly available in an Open Science Framework repository, an transparency measure that allows independent researchers to re-run every statistical model.

The headline result is a positive bivariate association between NEP scores and advantageous inequality aversion. In plain terms, people who reported greater discomfort with being better off than others also tended to hold stronger pro-environmental attitudes. This is the form of inequality aversion that most closely parallels altruism, since both involve a willingness to give up personal advantage for the sake of others, so the finding fits neatly within the existing literature linking other-regarding preferences to environmental concern. Intriguingly, however, no significant association emerged between NEP scores and disadvantageous inequality aversion. Disliking being worse off than others, the envy-like component, did not track environmental attitudes in this sample. The two forms of inequality aversion were, as expected, positively correlated with each other, confirming that they capture related but separable dispositions.

The story becomes more complicated when the researchers move from simple correlations to regression analyses. Once political orientation and sociodemographic characteristics were included as controls, the association between advantageous inequality aversion and NEP scores lost statistical significance. This pattern carries an important interpretive warning. The apparent link between fairness preferences and environmental attitudes may not be a direct causal or psychological connection at all; it could instead reflect an underlying confound. Political orientation is the most obvious candidate, since both environmental concern and redistributive preferences are strongly structured along the left-right political spectrum in many countries. People on the political left tend to score higher on both, which can generate a positive correlation between the two even if neither causes the other. The study’s design cannot adjudicate between these possibilities, and the authors are explicit that the findings are exploratory and warrant further investigation with more robust designs.

One demographic result did survive the regression controls: a gender difference. Women scored significantly higher than men on the NEP scale and also reported greater advantageous inequality aversion. This echoes a long line of research on gender and environmentalism. A meta-analytic tradition stretching back to work by Elizabeth Zelezny and colleagues in 2000 has repeatedly found women expressing stronger environmental attitudes and, often, more pro-environmental behavior, a difference that has been attributed to socialization, gender roles, and value orientations emphasizing care and self-transcendence. The parallel gender gap in advantageous inequality aversion suggests that the two dispositions may share common developmental or social roots, though the study does not test mechanisms. The authors also report a methodological caveat: the internal consistency of their inequality aversion measure differed by gender, with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.66 for women and 0.78 for men, a statistically significant difference detected using Feldt’s test, which the authors flag as a limitation noted in prior methodological work.

Why does this matter beyond the laboratory? The answer lies in the economics of environmental policy. Policies that aim to protect the environment almost always redistribute something, whether it is the cost of a carbon tax, the allocation of emission permits, or the siting of infrastructure. Research has shown that inequality aversion predicts support for public and private redistribution in general, and that public acceptance of environmental instruments such as CO2 taxes depends heavily on perceptions of fairness in how burdens are shared. If the same people who object to unequal outcomes are also the people most receptive to environmental messages, then framing environmental policy in distributive terms, emphasizing who bears the costs and who reaps the benefits, could be a powerful lever for building coalitions. Conversely, if the association is largely an artifact of political orientation, then fairness framings may simply activate existing political identities rather than persuading anyone new. Distinguishing between these scenarios is precisely the kind of question the Czech team’s exploratory results set up for future, better-powered studies.

The study also fills a genuine gap in the literature. A comprehensive interdisciplinary review by Niklas Heinz and Astrid Kausel-Köhler published in Ecological Economics in 2021 catalogued experimental studies of other-regarding preferences and pro-environmental behavior and found altruism dominating the field, with inequality aversion rarely operationalized at all. Recent work has begun to change that. A 2021 study by Liam Delaney and colleagues examined whether economic preferences broadly predict pro-environmental behavior, and a 2021 analysis by Andreas Ziegler explicitly brought the NEP scale into contact with behavioral economics measures of social and economic preferences. The new study extends this line by isolating the two directional components of inequality aversion and testing them separately against environmental attitudes, a granularity that earlier work lacked. Related research on informal recycling in Vietnam, charitable contributions for conservation among the rural poor, and social preferences for the distributive outcomes of climate policy all point in the same direction: distributional concerns and environmental outcomes are intertwined in ways that single-preference models miss.

The authors are careful about what their data can and cannot show. The association between advantageous inequality aversion and environmental attitudes is positive but modest, and it does not survive controls for political orientation and sociodemographics. The sample is drawn from a single country, the measures are self-reported, and attitudes are not behavior, a gap that environmental psychology has documented extensively, including in prior work by Zíka and colleagues showing that the attitude-behavior gap runs in both directions. Still, the exploratory findings open a promising avenue. If future studies with experimental measures of inequality aversion, such as distribution games, and longitudinal or cross-national designs confirm a robust link, the implications would ripple through environmental communication, policy design, and our basic understanding of why some people embrace environmental values while others remain indifferent. For now, the study’s contribution is to have asked a question the field had largely overlooked, and to have shown that the answer, like the environment itself, is tangled up with fairness.

Subject of Research: The relationship between inequality aversion and pro-environmental attitudes

Article Title: Social preferences and the environment: exploring the relationship between inequality aversion and environmental attitudes

Article References: Laníková, S., & Zíka, V. (2026). Social preferences and the environment: exploring the relationship between inequality aversion and environmental attitudes. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01143-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01143-7

Keywords: environmental attitudes, inequality aversion, social preferences, NEP scale, altruism, environmental psychology, fairness, gender differences, political orientation, behavioral economics, pro-environmental behavior, distributional preferences