Many psychological perspectives offer insight regarding antecedents of environmental behavior and cooperation to protect shared environmental resources. This dissertation reviews several perspectives, drawing connections by applying each to an understudied but useful example of environmental behavior: shoreline maintenance decisions by residential shoreline property owners. Property owners can support regional biodiversity by growing native vegetation on their shoreline, providing critical riparian habitat. Habitat pressure is expected to increase with climate change. Shoreline property owners participated in correlational field studies and a randomized field experiment through paper surveys. In chapter 1, motivation to avoid negative conclusions about the impact of past decisions was predicted to cause overly-positive evaluations of environmental risk. Property owners (n=80) rated photos of their own shorelines and shorelines owned by other participants on four dimensions. Linear mixed-effect modeling revealed photos were rated more highly by their owners on all dimensions. Chapter 2 provided property owners (n=405) with feedback about how past shoreline maintenance decisions had impacted the lake, and measured intentions to change. Half of participants performed a values commitment task prior to receiving feedback. Feedback was predicted to increase intentions only when preceded by commitment. The prediction was not supported; little difference in intentions was observed between conditions. The study outcome and participants' written comments are discussed in terms of Reactance Theory. Chapter 3 measured the importance of beliefs and goals for shoreline decision making, drawing from multiple theoretical perspectives (n=566). Exploratory factor analysis revealed that variance was best summarized using 2 goal factors and 2 belief factors. The goal factors were identified as Appearance goals and Lake Health goals; the belief factors were identified as Stewardship beliefs and Prescriptive Normative beliefs. Strong coherence was observed for all factors. In chapter 4, external validity of the extracted factors was assessed. Shoreline vegetation scores for each participant's property parcel were obtained from a publicly available database and used as an outcome measure. Property owner factor scores, physical environment characteristics, and normative measures were entered as predictors in a linear mixed effect model (n=279). Consistent with prior literature, social norms were the strongest predictors of shoreline behavior.