Environmental Psychology: Environmental Behavior and Social Dilemmas

Values, Social Norms, and Pro-Environmental Behavior

Defining Values

• Values, such as freedom, equality, and protecting the environment, are desirable transsituational goals that vary in importance and serve as guiding principles in the life of a person or other social entities (Schwartz, 1992)

Social Value Orientations (SVO: Messick & McClintock, 1968)

• Cooperative SVO
  • People who are motivated by a desire to maximize joint outcomes
  • “I care about our shared success.”
  • More strongly linked to pro-environmental behavior
• Individualist SVO
  • Opele who desire to maximize their own outcome with no concern for that of others
  • “I primarily or only care about my success.”
• Competitive SVO
  • A desire to maximize their own outcome relative to that of others
  • “It is important that I am more successful compared to others.”

Schwartz’s Value Theory (Schwartz, 1992, 1994)

• Universalism - more pro-environmental behavior \n
• Self-enhancement values : left
• Self-transcendence values: right
  • Care about things from a universal perspective, social justice, etc.
  • High on pro-environmental behavior
• Can be seen as a continuum

Norms

• People copy what they think is normal behavior

Types of Norms

• Personal Norms
  • Refers to an individual’s belief about their moral obligation to engage in the behavior
• Descriptive Norms
  • What most people actually do (what you observe from most people)
• Injunctive Norms
  • Prescriptive Norms
  • Social expectation or pressure to engage in a particular behavior
  • Proscriptive Norms
  • Social expectation or pressure to avoid a particular behavior

Affective and Symbolic Aspects of Environmental Behavior

Theory of the Meaning of Material Possessions (Dittmar, 1992, 1994)

• Suggests that material goods can fulfill a range of instrumental, social symbolic and affective functions

  • Instrumental: what does it do practically?
  • Social Symbol: social class symbol
  • Emotions: happiness, pride

  

• Ferrari:

  • Instrumental: A car can bring you from point A to B
  • Symbolic: How does it signify your quality, social standing, group affiliation, etc.?
  • Affective: feeling excited and proud
  • Self-expressive function: often (but not always) possessions that symbolize close personal relationships and reflect personal history and memories, such as a photo album

National Identity and Environmentalism

• The role of national identity in collective pro-environmental action
  • 89% being a true New Zealander places high importance on being clean-and-green

Social Dilemmas: Motivational, Individual, and Structural Aspects Influencing Cooperation

Social Dilemma

• Situations in which individual interests are in conflict with collective interests

Criteria for a Social Dilemma

1. The payoff for each in their self-interest (called defection) is higher than the payoff for acting in the collective interest (called cooperation), regardless of what others do
2. But all individuals receive a lower payoff if all defect than if all cooperate

Types of Dilemma

• Large-Scale Dilemma
  • Refers to situations where many people interdependently act under conditions that represent high anonymity, low degree of communication, where choices to cooperate or defect are made by people in a collective
  • Usually imply short-term (e.g., economic boost) and long-term (e.g., climate change) consequences
• Resource Dilemma
  • Arises when multiple individuals share a limited resource with free access, where each group member decides how much to withdraw from the common resource
  • E.g., forests, rivers, fisheries
• Public Good Dilemma
  • The common goods depends on individual contribution but is accessible to all group members
  • E.g., paying taxes
  • Others benefit when I pay my taxes regardless of whether they contributed as well

Motives in Social Dilemmas

• Greed
  • Self-interest or defecting choice gives the individual a higher payoff
  • Based on survival instincts or social comparison motives
• Efficiency
  • The cooperative choice in a social dilemma corresponds to the efficiency motive to maximize collective outcomes
• Fairness
  • People find it hard to accept unfairness, both in terms of procedures and distributions of resources.
  • Deciding what is a fair share of a particular resource is often done by a process of social comparison, where people commonly use other people’s outcomes as a reference point for judgment of their own outcomes
  • Fairness in environmental psychology is equity, giving resources to people who need it more.

Factor Affecting Cooperation

• Group size
  • Larger groups decreases cooperation
• Communication
  • Discuss the dilemma in advance to inform people about the availability of resources
• Response-Efficacy
  • Make people feel that their actions are crucial in maintaining the resources
  • Make people feel individual contributions matter
• Environmental Uncertainty
  • People make selfish decisions when they do not know how limited the resources are
• Social Uncertainty
  • People make selfish decisions when they do not how much others’ engage in the cooperative behavior
• Social Norms
  • People cooperate when they observe cooperation as normal behavior