Good girl – bad boy. Making identity statements when answering a questionnaire

Environmental policy analyses often draw on stated preferences, with most humans having strong preferences with respect to how we view ourselves and how we would like others to perceive us. This may create systematic differences between reported and real behaviour, making policy analysis based on stated preferences difficult. In this paper, researcher Bente Halvorsen models how social and moral norms and the image we would like to project affect reported and actual behaviour.