Chapter 16

Introduction 

  • Psychologists are doing research related to interactions between people and nature  

  • Most environmental challenges are rooted in human behavior (pollution, etc)  

  • Human behavior is complicated  

  • Psychologists want to motivate sustainable behavior: behavior that promotes protection of natural environment 

  • Psychology promotes human well-being and environment affects people's well being  

  • Sustainability: Practices that can be place for an indefinite period.  

  • Ecological sustainability  

  • Economic sustainability  

  • Social sustainability  

  • Environmental Psychology: the physical environment and the ways people perceive, respond, and are affected by it  

  • Social psychologists- will look at environmental attitudes and the power of social influence  

  • Developmental psychologists- roots of environmentalism in early childhood  

  • Cognitive psychologists- study the ways people process information about environmental risks  

  • Clinical psychologists- impact of degraded environments on mental health 

  • Conservational psychology: psychology directed toward understanding and promoting a healthy relationship between humans and nature (aka. Sustainability psychology, green psychology)  

  • Ecological psychology: a theory of visual perception that emphasizes perception of the whole environment and to emphasize the importance of understanding behavior in context  

  • Ecopsychology: belief that psychological health requires a feeling of connection to the natural world  

Sustainable Behavior  

  • Three types of Pro Enviromental behavior  

  • Environmental activism ex. Protests  

  • Nonactivist public behavior ex. Policy support, signing petitions  

  • Private sphere behavior (behavior that is part of ones personal life)  

  • Curtailment behavior: reduction in some behavior that uses environmental resources (ex. Driving less) 

  • Behavioral choice: doing something differently, less focus on doing something less (ex. Organic goods instead of nonorganic)  

  • Technology choice: buying a hybrid car  

  • Most people recognize the fairness of doing their share but people reconcile alternative possibilities where not everyone does stuff equally 

  • Some people may work to be sustainable but others may not and then the collective effort fails  

  • Commons dilemma: Individuals must curtail their use of a collective resource or risk the irreversible depletion of that resource. Ex too much fossil fuels  

  • You have to look at stuff from a collectivist view but decisions are made by individuals  

  • Ways to encourage collective behavior:  

  • A sense of group identity can encourage cooperative behavior that preserves common resources  

  • Communication  

  • Trust  

External Influences on Behavior  

  • Nudges: a way to influence behavior without coercion  

  • Prompts: reminders of the desired behavior  

  • Work best when they are close in time and location to the behavior prompted  

  • If prompts are too heavy there is reactance: tendency to resist other people’s attempts to control our behavior  

  • Incentives: encourage sustainable behavior but rewarding people for making the proenviromental choice  

  • Behavior often returns to baseline if incentive is removed  

  • Social norms: standards of behavior that are associated with a particular role in society  

  • Social norms can inhibit or promote proenviromental behavior  

  • Residents in California increased electricity use if they were told they use less than their Neighbours and vice versa  

  • Not all social behavior is equally influential – models are more influential than normal people  

Internal Factors affecting Behavior 

  • Values: Relatively stable individual preferences for desired ways of being or acting  

  • Most people agree that the environment is important but can differ on how strong they value it  

  • Egocentric value: it’s personally beneficial so it is valued  

  • Altruistic value: good for the group, public-spirited  

  • Biocentric value: nature and natural entities s have value by existing, independent of human benefit  

  • Intrinsic factors are more important than extrinsic ones  

  • Knolwedge is another internal factor  

  • Value-belief-norm model: an individual develops a value, has their beliefs affirmed from an external experience, and then actively demonstrates pro-environmental behaviors based on those values and beliefs.  

  • Emotions  

  • Self efficacy: the degree to which you believe you can make an impact 

  • Guilt 

  • Good at motivating behavior change  

  • Attempts to guilt that are too obvious won’t work  

  •  

  • Empathy  

  • Empathy for animals is easy but empathy for trees and light bulbs is not  

  • Anthropomorphizing makes us more likely to empathize with the non human thing  

  • Identity: multiple way in which we think about ourselves  

  • Relate to group memberships  

  • Connected to values  

  • Related to self efficacy  

  • How is identity created  

  • Long history of experiences  

  • A single action can also affect identity  

  • Moral licensing: You’ve done something good so you have earned the right to do something not as good  

  • Spillover effect: an unintended consequence of an event or action that extends beyond its intended scope  

  • Foot-in-door effect: taking one action for a person increases the likelihood that you will take more difficult actions for the same person because you feel committed  

Environmental Attitudes  

  • Attitudes: evaluative responses to things based on beleifs about the attributes of that thing. 

  • Judgement is positive if we believe the target is consistent with ir supports something we values, and negative if the opposite it true  

Environmental Attitudes and their Origins  

  • Fairly positive in the public  

  • Two themes to environmental attitudes:  

  • Attitudes focused on preservation of nature (biocentric values)  

  • Attitudes focused on the utilization of nature (anthropocentric values) 

  • Biophilia: an inherited tendency to form an emotional connection with living organisms 

  • Humans used to seek out landscapes that provide food and shelter and that's still relevant today  

  • Explains why we see zoos  

  • Learning: enduring change in the individual as a result of experience, and attitudes can be formed through experiences  

  • Experiences in childhood are very important  

  • Place attachment: when people form bonds to places that have emotional significant, often where they spent their childhood  

  • What you observe also effects your attitude: if your parents and teachers care about the environment you prob will too  

  • Cultures also effect environmental views  

  • Some cultures see humans as part of nature while others separate them  

Attitudes and Environmental Behavior  

  • There are lot of influences on behavior besides attitudes  

  • Some attitudes are more influential than others  

  • Attitudes that are based on direct experiences versus learned from other people are most likely to affect behavior  

  • If people are not thinking about their beliefs and attitudes, attitudes can’t have an effect  

  • How to change an attitude  

  • The impact of a persuasive message depends on the source, the message, and the recipient  

  • You have to keep in mind a recipients characteristics when making a message  

  • Ex. Have they been exposed to this before? People are more susceptible to climate change if they haven’t learned about it rather than people who deny it  

  • It is important for the source of the info to be trust worthy  

  • Likeability and similarity to recipient are important  

  • Messages must be vivid and interesting  

Environmental Risk Perceptions 

  • There are many obstacles between people and behaving sustainably  

Limits on Rationality and Understanding  

  • Humans are not suited to environmental challenges 

  • Focus on short term 

  • Negative consequence: ignore future consequences  

  • Possible remedy: link future consequences to short-term costs and benefits  

  • Demonstrate status 

  • Negative consequence: excessive materialist consumption  

  • Possible remedy: demonstrate status through sustainable behavior  

  • Be influenced by concrete rather than abstract 

  • Negative consequence: pay attention to weather rather than climate  

  • Possible remedy: describe climate change in terms of tangible effects  

  • Use other people as models  

  • Negative consequence: Replicate unsustainable behavior patterns  

  • Possible remedy publicize positive role models  

  • Temporal discounting: a cognitive tendency where people value immediate rewards over future benefits  

  • Costly signaling theory: individuals engage in behaviors that are demonstrably costly to themselves as a way to honestly signal positve qualities or attributes about themselves  

  • Biases 

  • Denial is a bias: it is a coping mechanism allowing people to continue to function rather than be immobilized by fear or anxiety  

  • Justification: The need to describe actions as appropriate to the extent that people recognize that their own behavior has negative consequences but they believe they have no choice  

  • System justification: the tendency to want to believe the political/social system within which one lives is just and thus to be okay with the status quo  

Effective Environmental Messaging  

  • Framing: the way in which a particular choice is presented in a message  

  • Important part of framing is to know your audience  

  • To avoid having a message derailed by emotional biases, make sure the need for emotional; defenses among the audience is not too string  

  • Tips for communicating environmental problems  

  • Know your audience  

  • Tell a story  

  • Personalize the impacts  

  • Encourage self-efficacy rather than fear  

Environment and health  

  • Humans need a healthy environment to survive  

  • Living neer green spaces imporves physical health and lfie expectancy (there are other factors to keep in mind)  

Negative Effects on Well being 

  • Negative impacts of natural enviorment ex. Natural disasters  

  • Effect is stronger with people who have direct experience 

  • Environmental disasters can increase racial and economic equality  

  • Children are more at risk and disruptions in schooling can have long-term effects  

  • Economic challenges from natural disaster lead to stress and an increase in domestic violence and aggression  

  • Natural disasters can also have positive outcomes ex. Personal growth and sense of community  

  • Affects of climate change are: increase in natural disaster, rising sea levels, increase of temp, changing rain patterns  

  • Ecomigrations: migrations due to changing environmental conditions, are really stressful 

Positive Effects on Well-being  

  • Time in natural environment can make people feel better  

  • People involved in nature based activities feel calmer, less worried 

  • People who look at nature views can focus better  

  • Attention Restoration theory: The ability to direct one’s attention toward something that is not intrinsically interesting requires cognitive resources that can be diminished. The best way to restore resources is to engage in an activity that draws attention and doesn't elicit high emotional arousal  

  • Higher biodiversity or percived biodiviserity has greater positive impact than low biodiversity 

Sustainable Behavior and Well-being  

  • Sustaibility itself has positive effects  

  • People are satisfied because they are helping the enviorkent  

  • Materialsm makes one hapiness depend on extrinsic soruces which is not good  

  • People may deny enviormental problems to protect themselves from negative emotions  

  • Find meaning in the porblem by emphasizng the purposeful actions people were taking to address it