Measuring “Awareness of Environmental Consequences”: Two Scales and Two Interpretations

Moderate or poor reliabilities, worrisome correlation patterns and ambiguous dimensionality raise questions about the awareness of consequences scale being a valid measure of egoistic, social-altruistic and biospheric value orientations. These results may, however, indicate something else. An exploratory analysis performed on three samples collected from the general public provides evidence for a reinterpretation of the scale. We believe the concepts of egoistic, social and biospheric value orientations remain important as a potential explanation of behaviour. However, our results imply that whether people cognitively organise their beliefs in this way when considering adverse environmental consequences requires a different approach from the current awareness of consequences scale. The evidence shows the current scale must be reinterpreted as a measure of concern over the positive and negative consequences of environmental action and inaction.

[1]  L. Festinger.  A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance , 1957 .

[2]  C. Spash.  Non-Economic Motivation for Contingent Values: Rights and Attitudinal Beliefs in the Willingness To Pay for Environmental Improvements , 2006, Land Economics.

[3]  R. Dhar.  The Effect of Decision Strategy on Deciding to Defer Choice , 1996 .

[4]  J. Baron,et al.  Status-quo and omission biases , 1992 .

[5]  H. Chertkow,et al.  Semantic memory , 2002, Current neurology and neuroscience reports.

[6]  Wesley P. Schultz,et al.  Empathizing With Nature: The Effects of Perspective Taking on Concern for Environmental Issues , 2000 .

[7]  E.,et al.  Self-Discrepancy : A Theory Relating Self and Affect , 2022 .

[8]  J. Joireman,et al.  Integrating social value orientation and the consideration of future consequences within the extended norm activation model of proenvironmental behaviour. , 2001, The British journal of social psychology.

[9]  C. Spash,et al.  Motives behind willingness to pay for improving biodiversity in a water ecosystem: Economics, ethics and social psychology , 2009 .

[10]  Thomas Dietz,et al.  Values, Beliefs, and Proenvironmental Action: Attitude Formation Toward Emergent Attitude Objects1 , 1995 .

[11]  P. Stern,et al.  Value Orientations, Gender, and Environmental Concern , 1993 .

[12]  S. Schwartz.  Universals in the Content and Structure of Values: Theoretical Advances and Empirical Tests in 20 Countries , 1992 .

[13]  P. Schultz.  THE STRUCTURE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN: CONCERN FOR SELF, OTHER PEOPLE, AND THE BIOSPHERE , 2001 .

[14]  S. Schwartz.  Normative Influences on Altruism , 1977 .

[15]  Elizabeth C. Hirschman,et al.  Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , 1974, Science.

[16]  Clive L. Spash,et al.  Ecosystems, contingent valuation and ethics: the case of wetland re-creation , 2000 .

[17]  Gün R Semin,et al.  Linguistic signatures of regulatory focus: how abstraction fits promotion more than prevention. , 2005, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[18]  Sandy Lovie.  How the mind works , 1980, Nature.

[19]  Clive L. Spash,et al.  Ethics and environmental attitudes with implications for economic valuation , 1997 .

[20]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem , 1990, Journal of Political Economy.

[21]  A. Tversky,et al.  Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk — Source link , 2007 .

[22]  P. Schultz.  New Environmental Theories: Empathizing With Nature: The Effects ofPerspective Taking on Concern for Environmental Issues , 2000 .

[23]  A. Tversky,et al.  The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. , 1981, Science.

[24]  Cecilia Jakobsson,et al.  Moderating effects of social value orientation on determinants of proenvironmental behavior intention , 2003 .

[25]  M. Ross Quillian,et al.  Retrieval time from semantic memory , 1969 .

[26]  A. Homburg,et al.  Explaining pro-environmental behavior with a cognitive theory of stress , 2006 .

[27]  E. Higgins,et al.  Self-discrepancy: a theory relating self and affect. , 1987, Psychological review.

[28]  Tommy Gärling,et al.  The relationships between awareness of consequences, environmental concern, and value orientations , 2008 .

[29]  E. Brunswik.  Organismic achievement and environmental probability. , 1943 .

[30]  D. Kahneman.  Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics , 2003 .

[31]  G. Lakoff.  Women, fire, and dangerous things : what categories reveal about the mind , 1989 .

[32]  Thomas Dietz,et al.  Willingness to Pay for Public Goods: A Test of the Contribution Model , 1994 .

[33]  Yukio Hirose,et al.  The dual-process of reactive and intentional decision-making involved in eco-friendly behavior , 2007 .

[34]  X. T. Wang,et al.  Social cues and verbal framing in risky choice. , 2001 .

[35]  Y. Trope,et al.  The role of feasibility and desirability considerations in near and distant future decisions: A test of temporal construal theory. , 1998 .

[36]  Jennifer J. Tabanico,et al.  Implicit connections with nature , 2004 .

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

[38]  Rosemary Snelgar,et al.  Egoistic, altruistic, and biospheric environmental concerns: Measurement and structure , 2006 .

[39]  J. Knetsch.  Gains, Losses, and the US-EPA Economic Analyses Guidelines: A Hazardous Product? , 2005 .

[40]  E. Higgins,et al.  Beyond pleasure and pain. , 1997, The American psychologist.

[41]  M. Rokeach.  The Nature Of Human Values , 1974 .

[42]  L. Cameron,et al.  A Cross-Cultural Study of Environmental Motive Concerns and Their Implications for Proenvironmental Behavior , 2006 .

[43]  Troy D. Abel,et al.  A Value-Belief-Norm Theory of Support for Social Movements: The Case of Environmentalism , 1999 .

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

[45]  P. Todd,et al.  Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart , 1999 .

[46]  T. Odlin.  Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind , 1988 .

[47]  Thane S. Pittman,et al.  Inaction Inertia: Foregoing Future Benefits as a Result of an Initial Failure to Act , 1995 .

[48]  G. Lakoff,et al.  Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind , 1988 .

[49]  Shlomo Zilberstein,et al.  Models of Bounded Rationality , 1995 .

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

[51]  Yaacov Trope,et al.  Temporal construal. , 2003, Psychological review.

[52]  Barnaby Marsh,et al.  Heuristics as social tools , 2002 .

[53]  P. Stern,et al.  The New Ecological Paradigm in Social-Psychological Context , 1995 .

[54]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Anomalies: The Endowment Effect, Loss Aversion, and Status Quo Bias , 1991 .

[55]  J. Knetsch.  Environmental Valuation: Some Problems of Wrong Questions and Misleading Answers1 , 1994, Environmental Values.

[56]  A. Grob.  A structural model of environmental attitudes and behaviour , 1995 .

[57]  Jonathan Baron,et al.  Behavioral Law and Economics: Reluctance to Vaccinate: Omission Bias and Ambiguity , 1990 .

[58]  Allan Collins,et al.  A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing , 1975 .

[59]  Thomas Dietz,et al.  Toward a theory of choice: Socially embedded preference construction , 1995 .

[60]  William Samuelson,et al.  Status quo bias in decision making , 1988 .