Chapter 3 - Environmental Attitudes, Appraisals, and Assessments Flashcards
(50 cards)
What is the theory of planned behavior?
If a person is to act in an environmentally friendly manner, several factors must precede it. The person first must have had the intention to act in that way.
What 3 conditions must precede the intention to act in an environmentally friendly manner?
- Positive attitude toward the act
- Belief that this is the normal or usual way to act
- Belief that one has sufficient control over the situation to be able to engage in the pro-environmental action
What is a descriptive norm?
What people think is the “usual thing to do”
What is the values-belief norm (VBN) model?
The chain leading to pro-environmental behavior begins with a person’s values. The more biospheric, the more altruistic, and the less egoistic are one’s general values, the more the person will likely behave in an environmentally friendly manner
What is the New Ecological Paradigm?
A world view that the planet is a delicate, threatened, and interconnected system. Certain acts harm the planet and have adverse consequences. People will not behave in an environmentally responsible way if they do not believe that doing so will have any impact
What are the 4 kinds of actions a person can take with respect to their Values-Belief Model?
- Environmental activism
- Public non-activist behavior (writing letters, attending meetings)
- Private behaviours (recycling, taking the bus)
- Action within an organization (starting a recycling program at the office)
What is a Generalized Environmental Ethic?
People who hold pro-environment attitudes in more than one domain
Are people equally concerned with environmental issues over time?
If something goes wrong (oil spill), then concern for that particular issue increases but after time, interest sinks back to pre-disaster levels
What elements determine who is going to be most interested in environmental issues?
- Gender
- Age and Childhood Experiences
- Politics, Religion, and Social Class
- Cultural and Ethnic Variations
- Urban-Rural Differences
- Values, Moral Development, Felt Responsibility, and Worldviews
- Activities and Education
- Proximity to, and Threat from, Problem Sites
What contributes to age-related perceptions of the environment?
- Age effect - as people get older, they care less
- Cohort effect - events that have a greater effect on one set of people over another (those who went through the Great Depression)
- Era effect - The times are changing, that the overall political-social climate is growing more conservative so that everyone is less concerned about the environment than they used to be
What effect does gender have on one’s environmental concerns?
Women tend to express more concern than men, but appear to do less about it
What effect does age and childhood experiences have on one’s environmental concerns?
Younger people are more concerned than older people
What effect do politics, religion, and social class have on one’s environmental concerns?
- Less environmental concern has been expressed by those with conservative political views, and fundamental Christians.
- Richer countries are more environmentally conscious than poor countries.
- People in poor countries tend to be more concerned with local environmental issues (polluted wells) than they are concerned with global environmental issues
What effect does cultural and ethnic variations have on environmental issues?
- Recent research indicates that black Americans are more concerned about the environment than Euro-Americans
What effect does rural and urban differences have on one’s environmental concerns?
- Rural and urban dwellers regard the environment differently
- Rural dwellers want to protect the environment mainly so that it can fulfill human needs
- Urban dwellers may be more interested in putting nature’s interest ahead of humanity’s interest
What effect do values, moral development, felt responsibility, and world views have on one’s environmental concerns?
- People with altruistic and biospheric values report being more environmentally concerned
- Committed environmentalists have more secular and post-materialist values
What are post-materialist values?
Views generally held by more affluent citizens who no longer have to worry about the basic materials of life and can be concerned with “higher-level” goals and actions
How is one’s view of the nature of nature related to environmental concerns?
We have 4 myths regarding the nature of nature. Nature can be:
- Capricious - Capable of anything and unpredictable
- Benign - Capable of adapting, nature can find its equilibrium, even when she is disturbed
- Ephemeral - Delicate and fragile … even small changes can have drastic consequences
- Tolerant/perverse - Able to absorb some disturbance, but beyond a certain point, will collapse
Distinguish environmental concern from ecocentrism
Ecocentrism - the belief that nature deserve protection without regard for human costs and/or benefits
What effect does activities and education have on one’s environmental concerns?
- People who participate in activities such as hiking and photography are more environmentally conscious than people who participate in activities such as ATV riding and hunting
- The more people are educated on environmental issues, the more concern they have regarding the environment
What effect does proximity to, threat from, and problem sites have on one’s environmental concerns?
- The further people live away from a problem site, such as a landfill or waste disposal site, they less concerned they are
- Residents are in favour of reducing greenhouse gas emissions if they believe that this will not threaten their own jobs or freedoms
What are ways in which we can increase environmental concern?
- Environmental education
- Simulations
- Environmental stories
- Powerful images
- Organized public events
- A person to champion the issue
How does concern translate to action?
- Do people follow-up their attitudes with action?
- Some evidence says that the link between attitudes and action can be quite weak
- There is a problem in measuring the strength of someone’s attitudes and what they consider as their level of action
What is a Low-Cost Hypothesis?
- However predictable individuals’ concern may be, that their level of concern is much more developed than their actual pro-environmental behavior
- Environmental attitudes predict whether people will engage in simpler, easier pro-environment actions (recycling at home) versus high-cost behaviours such as giving up their car to take public transit
- How do we justify the gap between what we say and what we do?
