Environmental self-identity, self-efficacy, and the emergence of green opinion leaders: An exploratory study

Environmental issues have gradually become one of the most challenging global issues. In this Information Age where individualism is on the rise and self-media is prevalent, if we can use the power of individuals and make ordinary people become self-driven Green ambassadors to influence everyone around them, their power will be incomparable. This bottom-up force may even shake the entire society. However, how these "Green Opinion Leaders (GOLs)" are created is still an unresolved question. If we can understand the formation process of these GOLs, we may have the opportunity to generate more GOLs in the future. Therefore, this study applied participant observation methods to penetrate three local mountain hiking societies in Taiwan and conduct long-term tracking and unstructured in-depth interviews with five mountain hikers to understand why they eventually became Green Opinion Leaders (GOLs). The results show that "environmental self-identity" and the related "self-efficacies" of social and marketing abilities are the key elements making ordinary mountain hikers become GOLs. The four essential elements that form an environmental self-identity include (1) love of nature, (2) environmental consciousness, (3) environmental self-efficacy, and (4) nature self-identity. Finally, the research summarizes a series of efficient prescriptions for encouraging ordinary people to become Green Opinion Leaders (GOLs).