Climate change, powerlessness and the commons dilemma: Assessing New Zealanders’ preparedness to act

Abstract Mitigating climate change is recognized as an increasingly urgent task that requires understanding a range of different strategies, including voluntary behavior change. Among the psychological barriers to behavior change are perceptions of powerlessness and the commons dilemma. This paper examines the association between these factors in a sample of New Zealand citizens and clarifies their importance in relation to other barriers to action to mitigate climate change, including uncertainty and perceived risk. Stronger perceptions of powerlessness and the commons dilemma were related to lower levels of action to mitigate climate change and lesser importance being placed upon climate change as an influence on individual actions. The perceived risk of climate change and the perception that humans influence climate change were the strongest predictors of mitigation action.

[1]  M. Guyer,et al.  “Public” Choice and Cooperation in n-Person Prisoner's Dilemma , 1978 .

[2]  R. Platt,et al.  Consumer power - how the public thinks lower-carbon behaviour could be made mainstream , 2009 .

[3]  R. Mark Isaac,et al.  Group Size Effects in Public Goods Provision: The Voluntary Contributions Mechanism , 1988 .

[4]  R. Dawes,et al.  A Conceptual Review of Decision Making in Social Dilemmas: Applying a Logic of Appropriateness , 2004, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[5]  Peter Jacques,et al.  The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism , 2008 .

[6]  Arnold Vedlitz,et al.  Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the United States , 2008, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[7]  Luc G. Pelletier,et al.  The Impact of Behavioural Difficulty on the Saliency of the Association Between Self-Determined Motivation and Environmental Behaviours , 1997 .

[8]  N. Kerr,et al.  “. . and besides, I probably couldn't have made a difference anyway”: Justification of Social Dilemma Defection via Perceived Self-Inefficacy , 1997 .

[9]  C. Aitken.  Changing Climate and Changing Behaviour: Perceptions of Powerlessness and the Commons Dilemma , 2009 .

[10]  Sophie A. Nicholson-Cole,et al.  Barriers perceived to engaging with climate change among the UK public and their policy implications , 2007 .

[11]  Tim Jackson.  Motivating Sustainable Consumption , 2008 .

[12]  N. Oreskes.  The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change , 2004, Science.

[13]  Romans Pancs,et al.  Free Riding on Altruism and Group Size , 2001 .

[14]  Stewart Barr,et al.  A conceptual framework for understanding and analyzing attitudes towards environmental behaviour , 2007 .

[15]  G. Hardin,et al.  The Tragedy of the Commons , 1968, Green Planet Blues.

[16]  H. D. Coninck,et al.  Widening the scope of policies to address climate change: directions for mainstreaming , 2007 .

[17]  J. Tollefson.  Climate science: An erosion of trust? , 2010, Nature.

[18]  J. Corraliza,et al.  Environmental Values, Beliefs, and Actions , 2000 .

[19]  Lisa Dilling,et al.  Making Climate HOT , 2004 .

[20]  F. Conrad,et al.  Cognitive representations of the future: Survey results , 2006 .

[21]  C. Anderson.  The Psychology of Doing Nothing: Forms of Decision Avoidance Result from Reason and Emotion , 2003, Psychological bulletin.

[22]  Gerard H. Seijts,et al.  The effects of goal setting and group size on performance in a social dilemma. , 2000 .

[23]  Ross Cullen,et al.  Public Perceptions of New Zealand's Environment , 2006 .

[24]  Miles Hewstone,et al.  'Us meeting them': Intergroup contact, intergroup anxiety and the reduction of prejudice , 2000 .

[25]  Steven R. Brechin,et al.  Comparative public opinion and knowledge on global climatic change and the Kyoto Protocol: the US versus the world? , 2003 .

[26]  Katherine V. Kortenkamp,et al.  Time, Uncertainty, and Individual Differences in Decisions to Cooperate in Resource Dilemmas , 2006, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[27]  P. Stern.  New Environmental Theories: Toward a Coherent Theory of Environmentally Significant Behavior , 2000 .

[28]  Stephen Kaplan,et al.  Human nature and environmentally responsible behavior , 2000 .

[29]  Charles R. Plott,et al.  Public goods provision in an experimental environment , 1985 .

[30]  W. Au,et al.  Efficacy = endowment x efficiency: revisiting efficacy and endowment effects in a public goods dilemma. , 2009, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[31]  S. Schwartz,et al.  A Normative Decision Making Model of Altruism , 1981 .

[32]  S. Barr,et al.  A Conceptual Framework for Understanding and Analysing Attitudes towards Household-Waste Management , 2001 .

[33]  Unfccc.  Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change , 1997 .

[34]  Judith Petts,et al.  Rapid Climate Change and Society: Assessing Responses and Thresholds , 2005, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[35]  A. Patt,et al.  Adaptive capacity and human cognition: The process of individual adaptation to climate change , 2005 .

[36]  Ion Bogdan Vasi,et al.  The Mobilizer's Dilemma: Crisis, Empowerment, and Collective Action , 2003 .

[37]  Stephen Kaplan,et al.  New Ways to Promote Proenvironmental Behavior: Human Nature and Environmentally Responsible Behavior , 2000 .

[38]  Keywan Riahi,et al.  Climate Change 2007 : Synthesis Report : An Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , 2008 .

[39]  T. Gärling,et al.  THE ROLE OF UNCERTAINTY IN RESOURCE DILEMMAS , 1995 .

[40]  Martin A. Nowak,et al.  All in the game , 2006 .

[41]  V. Edwin Bixenstine,et al.  Collaboration among six persons in a Prisoner's Dilemma game , 1966 .

[42]  M. Boykoff,et al.  Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press☆ , 2004 .

[43]  Martin Sefton,et al.  The Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma: Evidence on Reciprocation , 2001 .

[44]  S. Eden,et al.  Individual Environmental Responsibility and its Role in Public Environmentalism , 1993 .

[45]  Jochem Marotzke,et al.  Stabilizing the earth's climate is not a losing game: supporting evidence from public goods experiments. , 2006, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[46]  I. Ajzen.  The theory of planned behavior , 1991 .

[47]  Daniel Pichert,et al.  Green defaults : Information presentation and pro-environmental behaviour , 2008 .

[48]  Timothy O'Riordan,et al.  The psychology of denial concerning climate mitigation measures: evidence from Swiss focus groups , 2001 .

[49]  M. Olson,et al.  The Logic of Collective Action , 1965 .

[50]  Robert E. O'Connor,et al.  In what sense does the public need to understand global climate change? , 2000 .

[51]  M. Haller,et al.  Dispositions to act in favor of the environment: Fatalism and readiness to make sacrifices in a cross-national perspective , 2008 .

[52]  Jacquelin Burgess,et al.  Rationalizing environmental responsibilities: A comparison of lay publics in the UK and the Netherlands , 1996 .

[53]  J. P. Rushton,et al.  Altruism and helping behavior : social, personality, and developmental perspectives , 1981 .