The investor that could and would: The effect of proactive personality on sustainable investment choice

This paper investigates the influence of exposure to environmental images and proactive personality on investor preferences for sustainable investment. Building on Barbara Fredrickson's broaden and build theory of positive emotions, we investigated how exposure to images of nature in a healthy (positive) versus damaged (negative) state interacts with the proactive personality trait in influencing an investor's willingness to forego financial return to invest in a sustainable investment option. The results of our experiment indicate that to stimulate sustainable investment, investors should be exposed to positive environmental pictures and that this effect is stronger for highly proactive individuals. These results suggest that proactive individuals in particular view sustainable investing as a way to promote environmental preservation. Our results hold even after controlling for wealth effects. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.