Conservation Psychology

What is Conservation Psychology

• Field of research aimed at understanding why people behave in ways that help or hurt the natural environment and promoting behavior that protects it.

• Sound familiar?

What does it have to do with wildlife?

• Saunders et al 2005

• Human behavior drives biodiversity loss

• Psychology is the science of human behavior

1:The Perception Challenge

• Help people perceive problems and communicate effectively

  • adaptive management

  • communicate with metaphors and stories

  • communicate risk through effective imagery

  • credible messengers

  • connect to existing values

2: The Conflict Challenge

• Resolve conflicts at community level so that people can work together

  • create a common identity while preserving original social identification combatants

3: Attitude-behavior challenge

• Promote links between values, attitudes, and sustainable behaviors by removing:

  • structural barriers

  • availability barriers (gold plating)

  • behavioral barriers (link specificity of attitude and behavior, promote social norms supporting the behavior, promote perceptions of control)

A Model for Understanding Behavior

1. Context affects behavior (assuming individual motivations drive behavior is the “fundamental attribution error”

   1. physical environment (e.g. Crime)…descriptive norms

   2. Social environment (information and norms) …prescriptive norms

2. Past experience drives interpretation of context

   1. history shapes what we think nature and environment is

   2. it shapes how we respond to our environment

3. Fundamental motives drive interpretation of context

   1. positive self image

   2. sense of belonging

   3. sense of control

Social psychology

• The study of how human values, attitudes, and behavior emerge from social context

Attitudes

• Positive or negative evaluations about an item or object

  • aligning public attitudes with media can effectively promote wildlife conservation

    • dolphins

    • sea turtles

Slicing Attitudes

• Cognitive versus affective

• Explicit versus implicit

  • snakes

  • bears

  • gender

  • age

  • race

Values

• Held values are “stable meaning-producing super-ordinate cognitive structures”

  • hard to change

  • early in life

  • good versus bad, right versus wrong

  • examples (hedonism, self-direction, universalism)

Behavior

• Individual’s actions or reactions to their environment

  • measured directly and indirectly (self report)

Behavior Models

• Norm activation models (concerns for others)

• Rational choice models (self-interest (avoid punishment get rewards))

• Cognitive Dissonance (with the perception of self)