3 Chapter 3 – Environmental Attitudes to Environmental Action

Plastic Recycling Advertising Campaign

In September of 2020, National Public Radio (NPR) published an investigative report about an advertising campaign that had been encouraging plastic recycling for more than 20 years. The ads in question encouraged people to recycle single-use plastic bottles, to think about where the nearest plastic recycling drop-off is and think about how it is probably much closer than you imagine, and to make extra efforts to encourage plastic recycling among their friends. NPR investigative journalists were somewhat surprised to find that the ad campaign had been quietly funded by large fossil fuel corporations. The reason they were surprised is that fossil fuel companies are generally believed to be against wide-scale plastic recycling as they sell a significant portion of their oil and natural gas to plastics manufacturers so that those manufacturers can make new plastics. Running an advertising campaign encouraging plastic recycling would seem, at first glance, to be supporting less use for a product made from their raw materials, which would ultimately mean they would sell less oil and natural gas to plastic manufacturers leaving them less profit.

The investigative journalists at NPR had a different theory as to why these corporations would be interested in advertising plastic recycling. The primary purpose of the ads funded by the fossil fuel companies seemed to be convincing the public of the possibility of plastic recycling. Thus, while people may have been encouraged to recycle their single-use plastic bottles, they had also received a message that it was acceptable to continue to buy and use single-use plastic bottles because they could be so easily recycled.

However, the reality of plastic recycling is not so simple. Lay people generally have an idea in their head about recycling that relies on experience with metal recycling. If you are not familiar with the realities of recycling, it is easy to believe that most recycling involves melting the material to be recycled and reforming it into a different shape to be reused. Plastic recycling does not follow this idea. Plastic recycling has many issues that make the metal recycling metaphor unsuitable. First, there are many kinds of plastic all with different chains of molecules. Attempting to melt down and combine different types of plastic will leave you with a clumpy mess that isn’t much use to anyone. Second, even if you get the same type of plastic together, the process of plastic formation is very heat sensitive. A few degrees off – either too cold or too hot – and the plastic can fall apart. In fact, despite what the ad campaign might tell you, plastic recycling is incredibly difficult if not impossible to accomplish with current technology.

But how could the fossil fuel companies have predicted that this ad campaign would continue to encourage use of single-use plastic bottles even though it is also spreading the message of the importance of plastic recycling? It’s because they understood how human beliefs link to human actions. This area of study is one of the oldest within psychology. And through many starts and research dead-ends, we have come to a place where we can predict reasonably well how what you believe will impact what you do.

The Reasoned Action Approach

We are going to skip over about 70 years of research on the connection between beliefs and actions and get right to the crowning achievement. In the 1970’s, colleagues Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen (pronounced Yit-zak Eye-zen) published their Theory of Reasoned Action. Since its original publication, this theory has been renamed both the Theory of Planned Behavior and the Reasoned Action Approach. We will use the more modern Reasoned Action Approach in this chapter but be aware that this same theory goes by multiple other names. This was a theory which attempted to link behavior and beliefs. They started with the idea that someone’s attitudes would impact their behavior. By this they generally meant a person’s likes and dislikes. People are more likely to do things that they like to do and are less likely to do things that they dislike doing. If someone likes the idea of recycling, it should be much easier to convince that person to participate in a recycling program than someone that does not enjoy the idea of recycling. However, several years of previous research had shown that attitudes are not the entire story on behavior. Most notably, Leon Festinger had shown that sometimes someone’s behavior can change their likes and dislikes – a process that has come to be called cognitive dissonance. This meant that Ajzen and Fishbein had to find other elements of the human experience that could add to their explanation of what connects people’s beliefs to their behavior.

The second piece of information one needs to understand behavior is the person’s subjective norms. Subjective norms are beliefs about what other people – especially those other people that are important to the person making the decision – want the person making the decision to do. The importance of social norms can be seen in many different advertising campaigns. Consider activities like getting a flu vaccination or voting. These behaviors are generally not individually liked but are a task that needs to be done to maintain something we do like. It’s generally not the most fun thing to make sure you register to vote, locate your polling place, research candidates to figure out who aligns with your values, find transportation there on election day, and stand in line to ultimately vote. However, we do appreciate living in a democratic society with peaceful transfer of power. Similarly, it probably isn’t very fun to navigate the American health care system full of health insurance, possible reimbursements, and lines at the clinic all to get poked in the arm and feel slightly sick for 24-48 hours. However, by getting a flu vaccine one protects both themselves and loved ones from infection and can slow the pace of flu infection in their community.

Have you ever noticed that voting places and flu clinics usually have stickers? Once you vote or get your shot, you can wear a sticker that proudly states “I Voted!” or “I Got My Flu Shot”. The goal of these campaigns is that other people that haven’t done those activities yet will see that many people around them have already done that activity and think it is important enough to announce it by wearing a sticker. This communicates information to the person considering voting or getting their flu shot. And that message communicated is that lots of other people that I care about have already voted or gotten flu shots. Maybe this is something that I should do too. Notice the main components of the ad campaign in our opening story. It was about getting people to 1) like the idea of plastic recycling but also 2) to encourage plastic recycling among their friends and family. This is an attempt to use subjective norms to influence people – even people that have never seen any of these ads in the first place.

There is one last element of the Reasoned Action Approach that was added to the theory after its original publication (adding this element prompted the first renaming to the Theory of Planned Behavior). And that element is called perceived behavioral control. Essentially, this component asks us to consider if the person making the decision believes that they have control over the behavior in question. Returning to our flu shot example, imagine someone that was very interested in getting a flu shot but are not given leave away from work to get it and the only health clinic they can get to is closed on weekends. In this case, the person may want to get the shot very much, but not have the control of the situation necessary to engage in the behavior. Note once again the prominence of this component in the advertising campaign from the beginning of the chapter. A large portion of the messaging was all about the simplicity and ease of plastic recycling. The more you can reduce beliefs that barriers exist to the action and can increase beliefs that the behavior is easy and convenient, the more likely one is to induce behavior.

The Reasoned Action Approach then says that all three components – attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavior control – can be added up into a prediction of someone’s intensions. Intensions, in this case, are the person’s perceived probability of action. How likely is it that I will do this behavior? Then, once we understand intentions, we can make a reasonable prediction of how likely it is that the person will engage in the behavior itself. So, someone that has a positive attitude toward recycling, who believes friends, family and neighbors want them to recycle, and who believe that recycling is an easy process will intend to recycle more. But, that’s not the only intention this set of believes could change. A positive attitude toward recycling, a belief that everyone around you wants you to recycle, and a belief in the possibility of recycling could also increase someone’s intention to buy new plastic bottles. After all, this person believes that plastic recycling is easy to do, so they probably don’t see much harm in buying a single-use plastic bottle every now and again.

One of the most useful aspects of the Reasoned Action Approach is that the theory can be used regardless of what behavior we are interested in predicting. It is equally useful in predicting whether someone will participate in a recycling program as it is at predicting whether someone will order Chicken Tandoori at a restaurant. In that regard, it is a useful theory to Environmental Psychologists, just not a theory that is entirely focused on environmental beliefs and action. So, this theory helps us understand when and why people will engage in behaviors that either help or harm the environment, but it doesn’t get us to a point where we can understand where people’s attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived control come from. Particularly for the attitude component, we will need to turn to other theories.

Prospect-Refuge Theory

Think about a place you really like and appreciate. This should be a place you would be willing to live for the rest of your life if money were no object. Think about what you would need nearby to make that space a viable place to live. That place probably has some common characteristics with other places that people tend to like.

When thinking about what sorts of places people like and where people tend to settle, researchers [X] Kaplan and [Y] Kaplan began with a simple premise. They said that, biologically, humans are very good at some things and not very good at other things. What are humans very good at? Well, we have exceptional eyesight compared to most of the rest of the animal kingdom. We can perceive depth – which many animals are not able to do – because of our two, forward-facing eyes. We also have color vision which many animals, for example dogs, do not have. Second, we also have a very large brain compared to our body size that can process a lot of complicated information. And the more time we have to contemplate that information, the better we are at getting an understanding of the cause and effect behind the events that we are seeing. There are other things that humans are relatively good at, but we will stop the list there and turn our attention to the things that humans are not good at. Humans are not very fast. Our species has moved toward an upright movement posture, which has been useful in freeing hands to use tools but has also made us quite slow relative to the rest of the animal kingdom. We are walkers, not runners especially when we compare ourselves to most other land mammals. We also lack biological means to inflict damage on other creatures. We do not have claws, fangs, or stingers with which to protect ourselves. Instead, we have moved toward using our large brains to fashion tools that can do those things for us.

The Kaplan’s began with a simple premise. Humans would likely appreciate environments where their biological strengths create a natural survival advantage. Thus, humans should like places in which sharp eyesight and constant information processing are useful to survival. And humans should shy away from places where having claws and fangs would be necessary to protect oneself from danger. Thus, they created the prospect-refuge model.

The prospect-refuge model breaks environmental elements into two broad categories. Refuge are places that provide resources that are needed for survival. These are very basic things like water, food, shelter, and ability to hide from dangers that might come around. On the other hand, prospect refer to environments that offer the ability to see long distances, especially those that allow someone to see threats, either natural or human-centered, from a long way away. The Kaplan’s prospect-refuge model says that humans, being very good at vision and information processing but not very good at fighting with large creatures that have sharp claws, should generally prefer prospect environments over refuge ones. However, one cannot survive if there are not abundant resources nearby. Therefore, humans should prefer environments that offer a wide view of the surrounding area, but also have a nearby area that contains the resources needed for survival. Then, humans can have a view of when the resource gathering area is likely safe, move in quickly with a group of people, gather the resources they need and then get out quickly. This helps us explain why many human settlements are on hilltops or open plains but also have nearby forests, wetlands, or other areas where plants we can eat tend to grow or wild game tend to live

Kaplan’s Model for Scene Preferences

               While prospect-refuge theory can help us explain certain human settlement patterns and provides an evolutionary explanation for preferences of certain areas, it can be difficult to apply this theory to individual scenes – particularly scenes with modern constructed elements in them. Evolution would have no explanatory power for why we might appreciate the view from a particular seat at a baseball game on a summer’s night. For such a purpose, the Kaplans offer their scene preference framework for understanding why some scenes are more appreciated than others. This framework states that there are four elements that amount to preferred scenes. These elements are coherence, the extent to which the scene can be easily understood and made sense of, complexity, how much it seems as though a person could remain occupied and busy, legibility, the scene seeming as though one could easily explore the area and not become lost, and mystery, the sense that there are things to uncover or learn if enough time was spent in the scene. As Kaplan tells it, the more of each of these elements exist within the scene the higher the preference for the scene will be.

However, much research has demonstrated that these elements are not independent of each other. For instance, a scene that contains a lot of complexity or mystery very likely is lower on legibility than other scenes. Further testing has also shown that preferences to not follow a more-is-better pattern. Instead, there are more complex relationships. More legibility is almost always associated with a greater preference for the scene, but more coherence does not. Moreover, the relationship with complexity is more difficult to explain. The first difficulty comes with defining what complexity means in the scene. Some recent authors have defined complexity as the number of objects that appear within the scene. This makes it easier for computer algorithms to count the number of objects and provides a more objective quantitative assessment. When defined this way, we do see increased complexity leading to increased preferences, but only for nature scenes. When looking at nature scenes, we do indeed prefer it when there are more objects in the scene than when there are fewer. When we consider urban scenes or scenes with mixed elements of nature and the built environment, there appears to be an upper limit to the amount of complexity people appreciate. Once that limit is reached the preference for the scene tends to go down.

A similar effect occurs for mystery, but the effect for mystery tends to happen in all scenes, not just urban ones. In all cases, there appears to be a particular amount of mystery that people tend to prefer.  If a scene has too little mystery, it may seem boring and uninteresting. People may wonder why they would be in that location in the first place. However, if a place has too much mystery it may seem scary and anxiety provoking rather than interesting.

Taken together, this research helps us understand why we tend to like certain places and dislike others. These places tend to fit what we are biologically good at as a species and generally contain the right amount of legibility, coherence, complexity, and mystery. They can also help us understand where our attitudes towards different environment come from. However, none of these theories can perfectly predict human behavior. There will always be things that can disrupt the relationship between intention and action.

Dragons of Inaction

               Robert Gifford has spent a great deal of research time asking why people sometimes report a that they appreciate their environments, have a great desire to help the environment, and yet seem to do very few actions that would demonstrate their appreciation or provide meaningful help to the environment that they greatly appreciate. He has identified seven principles which he calls Dragons of Inaction that must be dealt with if humans are to make meaningful progress on environmental improvement and climate change goals. These so called dragons are all barriers to implementing the actions that would align with people’s stated beliefs about the need for action on climate change.

Limited cognition. First and foremost is limited cognition. Our human brain only has so much cognitive capacity and can only think about so much at one time. Because of this, we tend to direct our attention to those things that are more physical present and immediately pressing. This can lead people to pay a limited amount of attention to climate issues and be either unaware of the problems associated with climate change, or become numb to climate messaging because it seems boring or too complicated to think about.

               Ideologies: Ideology concerns can also limit people’s actions on climate change. This means that override beliefs in how systems aught to work impact the type of actions we are willing to take. We may believe that generally the status quo should be preferred in most situations, so any change made to a system must be done only if the system is dramatically malfunctioning. Or we may have an ideological belief about the superiority of the free market to solve problems and thus shy away from government regulation. Some may also have a belief that technology will solve every problem and thus, all problems are inherently solvable. In all of these cases, ideology plays a significant role in stopping people from changing their patterns of behavior.

               Social norms. Other people can have an outsized influence over the actions we tend to take. If we believe that most people that matter to us want us to do something, we tend to do it. We saw this earlier in the chapter with the Reasoned Action Approach where social norms were a significant portion of that model. So, it all the people around you are not changing their behavior around climate change, you may feel little need to change as well.

               Sunk costs. Sunk costs refers to a particular cognitive bias in which previous actions can have a large influence on our behavior, even if the reasons for acting that way in the past no longer apply to the here and now. So it may make climate policy sense to change from a transportation system that primarily uses cars to one that uses more electric rail. However, nations around the world have invested trillions of dollars into highways systems, making the case for changing away from those systems more difficult for some to accept.

               Discredence: This refers to purposeful efforts by powerful individuals to make experts on climate change appear in a negative and unflattering light. It tends to result in people taking a dim view toward experts and the knowledge that they have to offer. This is especially true when it interacts with the Ideology dragon above. These two can work together to lead people toward one way of thinking and away from actions that would help preserve the environment they love.

               Perceived risk: This dragon involves the perception that actions that could help improve climate change might be riskier than the actions one is currently doing. Biking to work may be a useful way to reduce air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions, but one is also much more exposed on a bike. Say what you will about the climate impact of automobiles, but they do represent a two-ton cage that will keep you safe in the event of a serious crash. A bicycle offers no such protection in that instance.

               Limited behavior: Our final dragon is limited behavior – the belief that very small changes will be enough. This can mean one of two things.  First, it can mean that someone makes a very small, token change that may get others off their back, but doesn’t really change much at all in terms of carbon footprints. For example, someone may believe that putting recyclables into their cities no-sort recycling bin is all they need to do to take action. Second, this can mean rebound effects – in which a change in one area results in people feeling they have more slack and can therefore make compensatory changes in other areas. The introduction of LED lightbulbs has vastly reduced the amount of energy needed to light most homes. However, because these lightbulbs require less energy, construction standards are beginning to change. Many people like lots of light in rooms, and because the cost of use for an individual lightbulb is about 1/6th what it used to be, new construction is beginning to incorporate 6 times as many light fixtures.

Summary

               The Reasoned Action Approach is an applicable theory for understanding how people’s attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control will impact their intentions and ultimately their actions. It is one of the most universally useful theories in psychology for this reason. In addition, other theories such as Kaplan’s prospect-refuge theory help explain why people tend to develop positive attitudes toward some places but not others. Finally, Gifford’s Dragon’s of Inaction help us to understand times when intentions may be high, but actions do not follow through.