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The Need for a Psychology of Human-Environment Interaction
Daniel Sullivan
I will assume that those reading this article are already interested in revising humanity’s modes of dealing with the environment, in order to slow the alarming loss of biodiversity occurring on a daily basis, and to do what we can to avoid future ecological disaster. With such a goal in mind, the field of environmental psychology is a useful and perhaps necessary discipline to which we shall turn, concerned as this discipline is with both the impact of environments on people and people on environments.
When attempting to formulate a psychological approach to protecting the environment, one is immediately confronted by the question of whether it is preferable to target people’s attitudes or their behaviors for change. This “attitudes vs. behavior” question often crops up in debates within psychology, particularly in applied areas such as psychotherapy. When it comes to the psychology of our relation to the environment, from almost the beginnings of this relatively young field the question has been a prominent one, particularly amongst those seeking to effect immediate and lasting change in the ways we treat the natural world.
Even writing within the same volume – Psychology and Social Responsibility: Facing Global Changes (1992) – two pioneers of environmental psychology, John E. Mack and E. Scott Geller, advocate diverging attitude-change and behavior-change perspectives on modifying human activity to preserve biodiversity and natural resources. While Mack insists on designing a spiritually-tinged “psychology of relation” to the environment, which would analyze our preexisting attitudes towards Nature with an eye for reinvention, Geller argues that directly altering people’s daily interactions with the environment at the consumer, governmental and industrial levels of behavior is the most cost-efficient approach. For some psychologists, if we can guide popular mental conceptions of Nature and her importance in the proper directions, then respectful and farsighted behavior will follow – a “top-down” attitudinal change. Others hold, however, that attitudes on environmental matters are intangible, resistant to change, and not necessarily predictive of behavior anyway; thus, we should target specific behaviors in home and workplace, and find ways of influencing them for the better.
Attitudes toward the natural world which are difficult to quantify doubtless play an important role in the quest to maintain our planet’s beauty. The majority of us who believe in fighting global warming, let alone conserving endangered species and protecting rainforest land, become committed to these causes initially out of a “gut” sadness at the prospect of humanizing the world beyond recourse, and only later realize the economic and practical benefits of protecting Nature. A psychological fascination with natural beauty is perhaps the surest source of environmental-friendly behavior.
Nevertheless, here I am going to argue that finding ways of first modifying behavior as a hopeful step toward eventual attitude change is the best psychological approach to protecting the environment. In short, our hope lies not in altering attitudes, but in regulating behavior. While there are many obstacles to initiating widespread attitude change on this particular issue, tinkering with behaviors on a smaller scale has already proven to be a successful approach, with examples such as the recycling of household items or restriction of activity on federal preserves. Whether such “bottom-up” regulation of behavior will lead to increased prevalence of pro-environmental attitudes is another matter, but given the alternatives, I believe that initial targeting of environment-friendly behaviors over attitudes is the most efficient means of halting the damage our species is currently doing to the natural world.
Why attitude change is difficult
Consider the obstacles present to mass-scale attitudinal change where the issue of environmental protection is concerned. First of all, research has connected differences in people’s attitudes towards the necessity of environmental preservation to fundamental psychological constructs, such as time perspective and intrinsic values (see Milfont and Gouveia’s 2006 Environmental Psychology article). Those most interested in protecting nature may also be those who value altruism most highly, or who tend to conceptualize time in a future-oriented way. Environmental attitudes may not be flexible if they arise largely from rigid, dispositional aspects of a person’s psyche.
Furthermore, most of the issues related to human misuse of the environment are distant and vague for the average citizen. The Amazon jungle and the world of tomorrow in which sea levels have risen to the point of swallowing Miami seem far from us spatially and temporally. How can you change the attitudes of individuals towards places and objects with which they have never come into contact? And even if you do change their attitudes towards distant places or the lot of future selves, is their daily behavior likely to change as a result?
Substantial psychological research has already demonstrated that where the particular issue of global warming is concerned, it can be extremely difficult to convince the public that this is a personally relevant threat worthy of collective response. In a Risk Research article both reviewing past risk perception studies and presenting original research, Lorenzoni, Leiserowitz, and de Franca Doria (2006) found that both U.S. and British citizens are unlikely to conceive of global warming as anything other than a distant threat, and are seldom personally invested in finding solutions to this problem.
A hallmark of social psychology is the finding that personal relevance of an issue should be high if people are to be expected to adopt long-lasting attitudinal change regarding that issue. Petty and Cacioppo presented a model of the psychological process of persuasion in their 1986 book Attitudes and Persuasion which holds that people must feel highly invested in a topic before seriously entertaining the type of complex argument which is often used to convey the reality of impending ecological disaster. If many people feel as little personal connection to the problem of global warming as Lorenzoni et al.’s participants, than it is unlikely that the public is going to undergo attitude change as a result of continued attempts at elaborate, scientific argumentation.
Al Gore’s film "An Inconvenient Truth" (2006) took advantage of modern media to help change attitudes about global warming, but this was done largely by increasing personal relevance of the warming threat through cinematic scare tactics. In line with this, Meijnders et al. (2001) published work in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology demonstrating that high levels of fear can induce compliance with arguments supporting action against global warming. But perceived “liberal fear-mongering” in connection with environmental issues can also prompt an attitudinal backlash, and citizens may begin to rely more and more on the line of counterargumentation used by Michael Crichton in his outrageous novel State of Fear (2004) – denial (the science is not decisive on whether humans are contributing to global warming), complacency (technology has solved all crises in the past, and will do so again), and conspiracy-theorizing (climatologists and politicians are perpetrating a pseudoscientific “hoax” akin to the eugenics movement).
Accusations of stirring up unwarranted fear regarding spatially and temporally distant threats are not the only source of resistance to top-down change of environmental attitudes. Partly due to the indeterminate nature of the consequences of environmentally hazardous activity, this is not a case where the societal norms for “right” attitudes are clear. While all sorts of persuasion and influence strategies have been proven effective in areas such as reducing intergroup prejudice, the norms for the social situations involved are generally quite unquestionable. It is well-known in modern Western society that one is expected not to discriminate against black persons because of their racial background. Whether or not one is expected to drive an energy-efficient vehicle is another matter.
To the extent that social norms in the domain of environmental conservation are unclear, there are philosophical justifications that may be embraced by individuals for choosing to hold one attitude or the other. Many who are most committed to a status quo (rather than activist) view of human interaction with the natural world call upon an argument which developed largely out of Darwinian thinking. As Adam Phillips (in Darwin’s Worms, 2001) and W.S. Merwin (in his current public lectures) point out, it is a false dichotomy and historical relic to think of “Man” and “Nature” as two separate entities – as Darwin showed, we are a part of nature, inside of it, one of its species, and thus everything we do is technically “natural.” Although I don’t believe that either of these intellectuals – Merwin in particular – would use this line of reasoning as justification for the continued thoughtless exploitation of our natural resources, they do observe the valid point that it is not necessarily a logical given that some human activities or human-influenced settings are more “natural” or less “unnatural” than others. If the rise in population of a given species had triggered a mass extinction event in the distant past, we would probably not call this unnatural, but rather one of evolution’s many anomalies.
Such argument does not remove the possibility that we are behaving recklessly in our wanton misuse of our natural resources – after all, any psychiatrist knows that an individual’s behavior may be damaging to her own self, and even if we are a part of nature, that doesn’t mean we aren’t destroying it –, it does seem to knock some of the wind out of aesthetic platitudes along the lines of Seuss’ Lorax. Even those who think critically about the issue of environmental conservation may rely on the claim that everything we do is part of nature, as a last bastion from which to resist attitudinal change on this topic. What’s more, they may set up a false dichotomy to replace the old “Man vs. Nature”: Many environmental conservatives now take refuge in the idea that green liberals are valuing abstract Nature and unborn generations over current human lives, painting a world picture in which we have to choose between eliminating poverty and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Though I personally find this notion foolish – we can take action to both preserve the environment and better human lives – the strong ideological appeal of a “Man or Nature” choice is just one more contributor to the inflexibility of mass attitudes on environmental protection.
How behavioral change is possible
In contrast to these obstacles revealed in the study of public attitudes towards preservation of the environment, research has suggested that initiating change at the level of small, locally-oriented behaviors can be quite successful. People often feel personally invested in protecting the environments they feel connected to – their communities, their workplaces – and moreover, if social norms in a given area encourage certain eco-friendly modes of conduct, individuals will often comply with them regardless of their more global attitudes on environmental issues.
Ecologist Michael Rosenzweig is a champion of one method of environmental preservation which aims at adjusting our treatment of nature on a small but meticulous scale: what he calls “reconciliation ecology.” This multidisciplinary approach involves governmental and industrial planners “meeting Nature halfway” – in other words, policymakers and developers cooperating with life scientists to design our living and working spaces while maintaining biodiversity on a case-by-case basis. As Rosenzweig pointed out in a recent lecture (available as a podcast at http://podcasting.arizona.edu/campus?q=node/16), this can often be more practical than it sounds – even the U.S. military now organizes many of its training maneuvers in such a way as to avoid damage to the wildlife on and around its bases. And sometimes encouraging suburban communities to grow even the smallest amount of native vegetation in their front yards can allow for dozens of local species to flourish.
People are likely to be on board with behavior-modification programs which will guarantee improvements in or preservation of their local environments. Even relatively small discrepancies in the proximity of living to a given area can make a critical difference in the likelihood of citizens to take an active interest in the protection of that area (as a study published by Brody, Highfield and Alston in a 2004 volume of Environment and Behavior showed). But there is also evidence to suggest that attempts at behavioral control through the manipulation of social norms may have strong psychological impact regardless of personal investment in the environment.
In his "Psychology and Social Responsibility" chapter, Geller lists “modeling” of behavior as an important activator of pro-environmental activity. He stresses that if specific, concrete behaviors are modeled or encouraged in clear manner, in close proximity to opportunities for engagement in these behaviors at no great inconvenience, compliance will result. Modeling of certain behaviors is a way of creating social norms, and as Stuart Oskamp (2000) emphasized in an American Psychologist article, clear behavioral norms – especially as set by laws and regulations – are essential to the project of spreading eco-friendly behaviors.
A social psychologist who has spent years studying the influence of norms on behavior, Robert Cialdini has provided empirical evidence that the actions of others and perceived societal standards can determine the interactions of individuals with their environment. In a series of studies (reviewed by Christina Bicchieri in her 2006 book The Grammar of Society), Cialdini and his colleagues have shown that individuals are more likely to throw away litter after observing another person do so, and that littering is much more common in areas which already appear unclean (suggesting that there is no local anti-littering norm) than in areas where hardly any litter is present. In a related way, Artz and Cooke manipulated pro-environmental norms through a mass e-mail campaign conducted in a study for publication in a 2007 edition of the Journal of Marketing Communications. Here, researchers used the new medium of the listserv to convince individuals that the socially right “thing to do” is to use energy-efficient technology in the home.
To summarize this work, it appears that small acts of behavioral modeling or instituting norms through community regulation may go a long way towards getting the ball rolling on pro-environmental behavior. In European countries where detailed division of various types of items for recycling is the norm, such behaviors are generally followed as a matter of routine by citizens, regardless of their attitudes on issues like global warming. People are eager to meet the expectations of their friends and neighbors, and if local intervention on behalf of the environment can be encouraged through manipulation of social norms, than perhaps actions more impactful on a global scale – such as encouraging corporations to invest in solar technology or contributing donations to rainforest conservation efforts – may also be made normative through similar modeling techniques.
In conclusion, though there appear to be several psychological barriers to substantial attitude change on global environmental preservation, psychological investment in preserving local environments and meeting social norms may be used advantageously to encourage or control small but important behaviors relevant to biodiversity and resource conservation. Though ultimately many of the coming challenges we will face as a result of our reckless use of the environment will have to be solved through technological improvements, such as increases in the economic efficiency of alternate energy sources, a well-reasoned psychology of our interactions with the planet can only facilitate this cause. Such a psychology would be wise to avoid naïve and probably fruitless attempts at attitudinal interference, and grapple instead with the question of how best we can aid the environment along lines which have already proven somewhat successful.
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Daniel Sullivan recently received his B.S. in Psychology from the University of Arizona. He is the co-author of ten academic manuscripts, either published or pending publication, on topics ranging from social to organizational psychology and film criticism. He is a graduate student in social psychology at the University of Kansas. |
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