Environmental awareness, altruism and social influence as drivers of sustainable behavior in university students

In today’s world, where decreasing our ecological footprint is synonymous with achieving a sustainable future, identifying the key drivers of sustainable behavior is essential. This study explores how sustainable behavior is individually impacted by environmental awareness, altruism and social influence, as well as the impact of environmental awareness mediated by altruism. It involves constructs from established literature to provide a new model. This model takes data from an online Qualtrics survey which was distributed to 77 university students and then analyzed through the PLS-SEM method. The results show a significant impact of environmental awareness, with altruism as its mediator, on sustainable behavior while altruism by itself and social influence hold less influence. This provides decision and policy makers with guidelines to improve motivational campaigns in order to encourage the most people to adopt more sustainable practices.