What's more important: the immediate environmental and health impacts of a product or service, the way it's marketed, or the decision-making culture in the company that produces or retails it? Most people concerned about the contribution that business makes to tackling social and environmental challenges would probably say that the immediate material impacts are the most important. But that perspective is coming under increasing scrutiny.

This re-think is starting because of a growing awareness of the results of recent studies in social psychology. There are two streams of evidence that are of particular importance here.

Firstly, it is now clear that our responses to environmental and social challenges are shaped by the things that we collectively hold to be important – our cultural values.

Social psychologists have identified a constellation of 'intrinsic' values which underpin increased social and environmental concern, and greater motivation to act in line with this concern. This constellation includes values for justice, broadmindedness, community, forgiveness, love, and – of course – environmental protection. These values are related to one another: hold one of them to be important, and you are more likely to hold others to be important.

An opposing set of values undermine social and environmental concern. These are values of wealth, public image, social power and concerns about security. They also tend to occur together. Moreover, if a person holds these 'extrinsic' values to be important, the person is likely to attach lower importance to 'intrinsic' values. This has been called the see-saw effect: factors that strengthen extrinsic values tend to act to weaken intrinsic values, and vice-versa.

Second, the long-term importance that we attach to particular values builds up over time, as these values are repeatedly activated. Particular values (perhaps those of authority, or self-direction, for example) are likely to be activated and re-activated throughout our childhood. Other values will be strengthened over the course of our education.

But our values are also, of course, importantly shaped by business. Most obviously, business may influence our values through the advertising we see, the TV we watch, the computer games we play, the magazines we read. But there are many other influences. Some of these are product-related. For example, a luxury car – irrespective of its fuel-efficiency – may activate values relating to wealth and social power.

Other influences may arise not because of the characteristics of the products or services that a business produces, but because of the way in which the business is run.

As staff, our involvement in decision-making or our experience of pay-differentials and incentive schemes, the pressure we may feel to eat into family time in order to advance our careers, the appetite we are encouraged to feel for promotion, or the insecurities that we may feel about potential redundancy, will all contribute importantly to the values that we hold to be important.

Where these factors serve to activate and therefore, over time, strengthen extrinsic values, the see-saw effect will mean that they tend also to undermine the importance placed on intrinsic values. As a result, these factors will also erode the importance we attach to tackling social and environmental problems.

So, an ill-judged advertising campaign, or a corporate culture that instills employee insecurity, could contribute far more to exacerbating environmental problems – by further entrenching public indifference to these – than, for example, an irresponsible packaging policy.

These insights, drawn on experimental evidence in social psychology, situate corporate responsibility in the broadest of contexts. Staff charged with improving a company's social and environmental impact must cast their net wide.

A thorough approach to examining a business's social and environmental impacts must begin to grapple with a complex array of factors, striking to the heart of many aspects of an organisation's business model and its management practices.

Many of these factors – though undoubtedly important – will be hard to quantify. In exploring these issues, WWF-UK and the businesses with which we have started this conversation, are generating interesting questions and establishing innovative angles to pursue together. This series of contributions, on the Sustainable Living hub of GSB, will invite wider participation and comment as we pursue these issues further.

Tom Crompton is change strategist at WWF-UK. Sarah McMahon, who is working with WWF on this project, is formerly global head of marketing strategy for Accenture. For more information on this work, visit wwf.org.uk/change or valuesandframes.org

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