Andria Cimino
Stats 2235
Long Paper #1
12.7.05
The Gap Between Environmental Values and Conservation Behaviors
“It isn’t surprising that so many people think of environmentalists in terms of guilt and gloom. We don’t need an informed and depressed public; we need an informed public that believes it can be part of effective solutions.”
—Jane Elder, The Biodiversity Project
In poll after poll, a large proportion of Americans (often 80% or more) profess great concern for the environment. Yet, according to many of these same polls, as well as social and environmental psychologists studying the human-natural environment relationship, there is a gap between the stated high value Americans place on nature and their behaviors, which remain by and large destructive to the environment. 1,2
This disconnect is surprising in terms of behavior models that predict close alignment between values and behavior. According to the cognitive dissonance theory of behavior, an individual will strive to keep behavior consistent with values to avoid the discomfort of cognitive dissonance.3 People whose behavior does not match their values face a choice: change their behavior to support their values or change their values. In the case of the gap between professed environmental values and non-environmentally responsible behaviors (ERBs, also referred to as pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs), what is happening? It would appear that a certain amount of cognitive dissonance is being tolerated. Perhaps this is the result of living in an information-overloaded age, in which innumerable worthy causes from the local to the global fight for our attention every day. We are bombarded by solicitations in our mail and email, in shopping malls and grocery stores, simply walking down the street. We are exposed to the point of numbness to the grossest of injustices and unimaginable suffering in the news—tales of natural disasters, genocide, child abuse/prostitution/slavery, famine, disease, poverty. Everyone, it seems, needs our support, i.e., our names on petitions, our calls to legislators, and, of course, a steady stream of financial contributions. How to choose between them all?
Assuming the environment takes a level of precedence on one’s list of “causes to do something about,” as the polls suggest, the next question becomes what can I do? It is here that the breakdown between values and behaviors begins.
Why a Gap?
There are many theories about what causes this gap (and how to close it, which I address in a later section). Some see it as a data gathering/measuring/analysis problem. Others see it as an indictment of a flawed approach by the environmental movement, which for decades has emphasized both the enormity of the issues, instilling a sense of helplessness in many concerned citizens, and the need for sacrifice to solve them, turning off all but the most altruistic and “eco-centric” of individuals. Yet others have developed new behavior models based on research concerning the interplay of values, social norms, motivations, formative experiences, context, and information processing on pro-environmental behavior. I will attempt to outline some of what seem the most pertinent and insightful theories here.
Documenting the Connection between Values and ERBs
There are numerous difficulties involved in measuring the effect of values on ERB. The usual methods for gathering such data, for instance, are self-reporting surveys and in-person questionnaires, both of which can easily introduce bias (particularly voluntary response bias) in the results. This can be compounded by the fact that convenience samples often fall short of being representative of the entire population. Further, although researchers usually take great care in constructing their surveys, often looking to data collected in previous studies to formulate their questions about ERB, they may undercover certain topics, omitting ERBs that are indeed being practiced. Alternatively they may bias their results by including ERBs that are implausible for the population being sampled (i.e., commuting by public transportation in a city with insufficient infrastructure). Both may result in falsely negative skewed results.
Another type of omission may creep in when subjects practice certain ERBs for different motivations (composting for the garden, buying organic for improved health) and do not consider them environmental per se if surveys are not designed to capture this important distinction. And surveys that include behaviors that are harmful to the environment may introduce nonresponse bias if subjects do not feel comfortable admitting to them in an interview, or even a self-report.
Lastly, statistical errors can occur at the analysis stage, causing a researcher to conclude that a correlation between behaviors has little statistical significance when in fact the testing method simply was not powerful enough to reveal it (or vice versa, they find correlations that may be caused by another unaccounted for variable). Methods to account for measurement error, which can substantially attenuate analyzed correlations, must be used. Other methods to help reduce the impact of nonresponse (both full and item), which otherwise leads to a loss of statistical power, must be applied. 4
Overwhelming Complexity
Given the enormous scale of the most pressing environmental issues—global warming, depleted fisheries, rainforest destruction, etc.—it isn’t surprising that many folks believe that writing a check to an environmental organization is the best they can do. Indeed, according to Kollmuss and Agyeman in their article “Mind the gap: why do people act environmentally and what are the barriers to pro-environmental behavior?” environmental awareness (defined as understanding the impact of human behavior on the environment) is fraught with cognitive limitations, including the non-immediacy of many environmental problems (Americans in particular are protected from the effects of their consumerism), the slow pace of much environmental degradation, and the complexity of environmental problems. After their review of theoretical frameworks seeking to explain the gap, including altruism, empathy, prosocial, and sociological models, they concluded that the question of what shapes pro-environmental behavior is “such a complex one that it cannot be visualized through one single framework or diagram.” 2
Instead, they analyzed factors that seem to have either a negative or positive influence on ERB, dividing them into external (e.g., institutional, economic, social, and cultural) or internal (e.g., motivation, values, attitudes, emotion, locus of control, responsibilities, and priorities). They found that institutional barriers (such as lack of public transportation) and economic barriers (such as the high cost of environmentally friendly products or the low cost of fuel) tend to reduce ERBs. Further, they found that altruistic motivations to engage in ERBs are often overshadowed by more immediate motivations, such as comfort or convenience. And, perhaps most important, they found that people who feel that their actions can make a difference tend to engage in ERBs. 2
Taking Human Nature into Account
In his research on human nature and ERBs, Kaplan (2000) found that people resist practicing ERBs not because they lack interest in the environment or just don’t care, but rather from a sense that nothing can be done. Seeking to avoid the limitations of the altruism-centered approach—inadvertently fostering a sense of helplessness, stressing sacrifice rather than quality-of-life enhancing solutions, yet often failing to clarify what, exactly, needs to be given up and why, creating “an image of future deprivation that may be unnecessary and inaccurate”—Kaplan developed an alternative approach to promoting ERBs. His Reasonable Person Model has three goals: to provide a durable sense of motivation, to reduce the corrosive sense of helplessness, and to generate innovative solutions that people do not perceive as threatening their quality of life. This approach, which draws on evolutionary, cognitive, and motivational factors, requires “a coherent concept of human nature that speaks to the relationship between how people approach new information, the connection between information and motivation, and how information and motivation relate to behavior.” 5
Poking holes in the notion that good motives inevitably lead to good behavior, as well as the idea that behavior motivated by altruism is morally superior to selfishness, Kaplan instead notes that trying to evoke ERBs through these avenues is not only ineffective, because they do not take into account basic facets of human nature, but can backfire because the altruistic approach carries within it the implicit message that living with less will result in an impoverished and joyless future. Ironically, this perspective encourages the idea that the current model, consumerism, is the most satisfying way to do things, that there is a positive relationship between resource use and happiness, that materialism and waste are more fun. He points to research that finds the link between happiness and consumption does not stand up to careful psychological analyses. “Not only does the dour, negative view of the future put the worst possible face on appeals for ERB, it also undermines potentially powerful linkages with critiques of materialism as unhealthy and unsatisfying as well as environmentally unsustainable.” 5
Part of Kaplan’s model stems from the idea that self-interest, acquisitiveness, and pride have gotten a “bum rap” in environmental circles, where they are seen as inherently “bad.” He cites counter examples, noting how these traits are not only frequently to thank for such ERBs as the preservation of valuable natural landscapes by wealthy philanthropists or a neighborhood revitalizing its parks, but that they play a key role in motivating environmentalists too. The sensual and spiritual enjoyment of nature inspires the passion many feel for protecting it, and certainly the idea of future use is there as well; both are at odds with the definition of altruism as something done for someone or something else with no reward or benefit for the self (or even at a cost). Because of its denial of major aspects of human nature, Kaplan asserts, an altruistic approach is doomed to appeal only to a small minority of the “ecocentric.” 5
Kaplan’s model seeks to find a happy medium between the altruistic approach’s disdain of gain as a driver for human behavior and the economic cost-benefit analysis approach that sees everything in terms of gain. He prefers to see humans as active, curious, problem-solving animals for which a sense of helplessness is ill adaptive. Citing research by Levin (1993) that suggests this extreme dislike of a sense of helplessness holds true across cultures, Kaplan also notes that, in a test of Geller’s “actively caring” hypothesis, Allen and Ferrand (1999) showed that a sense of personal control (e.g., defined as the opposite of hopelessness, the extent to which an individual feels his or her action can benefit the environment) has a significant relationship to whether or not the person participates in ERBs. 5 This dovetails strongly with Kollmuss and Agyeman’s findings, as well as others explored below.
A Holistic Social-Ecological Approach
In “The psychology of environmentally sustainable behavior: fitting together pieces of the puzzle,” Kurz examines the problems inherent in four general psychological approaches to the analysis of ERBs, including rational-economic, social dilemmas, attitude-behavior models, and applied behavioral analysis. Although he introduces his own framework, the social-ecological approach, he does so to “provide some concepts that may be of use when attempting to formulate intervention strategies rather than as yet another a way to explain behavior.”6
In considering the rational-economic approach, Kurz finds shortcomings in the usefulness of, for example, trying to sell potential savings as a motivator for individuals to conserve resources or pricing over-consumption behavior out of the market, even assuming one could first resolve the valid concern for the potentially disastrous effect of such policies on the national economy. The overall problem with the rational-economic approach is its narrow view of what is motivating the consumer; for instance, in trying to understand why there are so many single-occupant motor vehicles contributing to long rush hours (not to mention the enormous resultant environmental damage), this model would not consider such motivations as a sense of personal freedom or convenience or as a status symbol. For these consumers, Kurz notes that a price increase at the pump or a tax on gas would most likely result in reduced spending elsewhere in their budget rather than a switch to an ERB, such as car pooling or taking public transportation. 6
Social-dilemmas approaches, based on game theory research conducted in labs, suffer from a limited applicability to complex global environmental issues, according to Kurz. In particular, they suffer from the opposite problem of the rational-economic approach in that they do not take into account the personal decision-making process that someone facing a water or energy shortage would have to, “weighing personal satisfaction/comfort, the welfare of the resource, and personal financial interest.” Perhaps even more importantly, he points out that such games presume that all players will feel the loss of a resource equally, which is not the case in the real world, where Americans are sheltered from the pain of their over-consumption, for instance, paying far less for gas than their European counterparts.
Kurz sums up the problem with the attitude models approach by noting that they often do not consider factors that interfere with an individual’s ability to perform ERBs. Even with the addition of non-attitudinal variables, he questions the usefulness of these models “because their continued goal is the disentanglement of cognitive, attitudinal determinants of behavior from other variables putatively separable from the individual and his/her psychological processing.” Attitudes are seen as “inherently static and separable from the other aspects of the system.” In short, such models, with their focus on attitudes, usually fail to accurately predict or explain behavior (although they have helped us discover and define the gap). 6
The main drawback to behavioral approaches, as Kurz sees it, are that effects on behavior often fade after an intervention is withdrawn, particularly when those interventions rely on “consequence strategies.” Part of the problem is that, like the rational-economic approach, behavioral approaches often fail to take important influences and motivations into account. For instance, in encouraging the use of water saving devices, environmental organizations would stress the importance of conserving water. But if the newly converted subject tends to take long, hot showers to decompress, it may not be long before the pro-environmental reasons for making this change fade and the subject has reinstalled the old showerhead.
Drawing on concepts from ecological psychology, such as Gibson’s notion of “affordances,” Kurz proposes a social-ecological framework for analyzing environmentally sustainable behavior (or ERB). Its central tenet is that attempts to understand and change ERB have to take into account the psychological relationship between individuals and their physical and social environments. The important unit of analysis is the interaction (both physical and psychological) between the individual and the relevant thing with which they engage to cause an environmental impact. This is where Gibson’s notion of affordances, i.e., the potential utility positive or negative, comes into play. In the case of ERBs, these refer to subjective perceptions (for instance, energy consumption) rather than actual physical objects. 6