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 with each renaming adding something important to the theory. 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 in the 1990’s). 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. We then expect that someone with higher intentions to recycle will begin recycling. 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, as long as they put that bottle in the easy-to-find plastic bottle recycling bin.

But what if someone does not have high beliefs in all of these things? Well, let’s examine the target of the advertising campaign from the story above. The advertising campaign was generally targeted toward people who have a positive attitude toward recycling, and who surround themselves with people who think recycling is generally a good thing. However, what if those people thought that plastic recycling was difficult or impossible? Well, those people would be less likely to recycle any single-use plastic bottles they happen to use. But their positive beliefs about reuse and their community ties don’t simply go away. Instead, these people may trend toward buying a reusable metal water bottle they can fill at a water fountain. So, if oil companies want to keep these people buying some single-use plastics, the goal is to convince them that plastic recycling is easy. If they think plastic recycling is easy, they may continue to buy single-use plastic bottles when it is convenient.

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 all 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 Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan began with a simple premise. 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 argument is this. Humans would likely appreciate environments where their biological strengths create a natural survival advantage and should dislike areas where their biological weaknesses could be exploited by other creatures. 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. This is the beginning of the modern 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, should generally prefer prospect environments over refuge ones. However, there is one additional problem with this settlement pattern. Prospect areas tend to be low on resources needed for survival. For example, wide open plains tend to have limited water resources. In scientific terms, prospect and refuge tend to be negatively correlated in natural scenes. This means that if a place has a lot of prospect, it tends to have very little refuge and if a place has lots of refuge, it tends to have low levels of prospect.  Thus, humans have a problem. Many of our survival adaptations are tuned towards areas of high prospect, but we cannot survive if there are not abundant resources nearby. Therefore, humans tend to prefer environments that offer a wide view of the surrounding area, but also have a nearby area that contains the resources needed for survival. By settling in areas of prospect that have nearby areas of refuge, humans can put their survival advantages to good use.  We can have a view of  an area where resources are available. We can use our exceptional eyesight and awesome brainpower to understand when the resource gathering area is likely safe.  We can then move in quickly with a group of people, gather the resources needed, and 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 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 do 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.

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