Chair: Thijs Bouman (University of Groningen) Speakers: Thijs Bouman – Department of Psychology, University of Groningen, the Netherlands Catho Vermeulen – Department of Communication Sciences, University of Ghent, Belgium Marylise Schmid - Department of Communication Sciences, University of Ghent, Belgium Cameron Brick – Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Abstract: In this invited symposium, we will discuss recent insights from psychological research on responses to environmental problems, such as climate change and biodiversity loss. In four presentations, we show how research in this context can strongly contribute to the advancement of theory and methods, while simultaneously having strong practical impact.
Environmental problems, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, are among the largest issues mankind has ever faced. These problems are caused by human action, have disruptive impacts on eco- and social systems, and require unprecedented levels of behavioral change for their mitigation. Hence, people are affected by, and responsible for causing and solving environmental problems, making this an eminent topic to be studied through a psychological lens. In this symposium, we will focus on personal and social factors that underlie people their environmental behaviors, as well as how environmental behaviors are constructed and structured in the human mind. In this, we will move from deeper motivational factors such as values, beliefs (talk 1, 2 and 4) and place attachment (talk 3), to more concrete environmental behaviors (talk 4), and discuss the steps and hick-ups in how environmental behaviors come about (talk 1 and 4). We will focus on more general psychological models and findings that explain environmental behaviors and the diversity in the performance of such behaviors, as well as on more concrete applications of such models in the Flemish Coastal Region (talk 2, 3).
Talk 1 (Thijs Bouman) addresses will the discrepancy between personal values and environmental behavior, and provide explanations for this. Specifically, whereas most people appear - on the one hand - to strongly care about nature and the environment, their pro-environmental actions - on the other hand - lag behind. In this talk we show that one reason for this may be the perceptions people have about each other. People strongly underestimate each other’s motivations to take pro-environmental action, which may for various reasons cause individuals to not act on their own pro-environmental motivations anymore. These reasons, as well as different potential interventions, are discussed, providing understanding of people’s personal and social motivations, and the processes through which these translate (or not) into concrete actions.
Talks 2 and 3 will present findings from a larger research project focusing on the Flemish coastal region. This project investigated how tourists (n = 762) and residents (n = 426) of the Flemish coastal region experience the region and engage in local environmental behaviors, with a strong emphasis on value orientations (Talk 2) and perceptions of place (Talk 3). More specifically, Talk 2 (Catho Vermeulen) zooms in on the construct of values in the context of the (natural) marine environment. In her presentation, she shows how basic human values (i.e., general life goals of individuals) translate into more context related value orientations, some of which affect feelings of personal responsibility to take care of the marine environment. In this, she differentiates between four distinct marine value orientations, namely: intrinsic (the marine environment has value in itself), nature-relational (valuing the marine environment for enabling people to experience nature), communal (valuing the marine environment for bringing people into contact with each other), and instrumental (valuing the marine environment for bringing people services and resources). The relevance of these value orientations, both for theory and practice, will be discussed. Talk 3 (Marylise Schmid) focuses on how tourists and residents attach to the Flemish coast, how these depend on different perceptions of time periods (recent past, present, future), and how these may affect engagement in pro-environmental action in the region. Tourists and residents have different perceptions of the Flemish coast region, and attach differently to it. Moreover, the association between these constructs, as well as their associations with pro-environmental engagement, differs across the groups. This highlights that perceptions of environments are construed differently in the minds of people depending on their engagement with these environments, which has consequences for how they interact with the environment and their willingness to protect and conserve it.
The symposium will be closed by talk 4 (Cameron Brick), first reflecting on public opinion on climate change, both in terms of reactions to protests and individual advocacy and protest actions, and thereafter transitioning to measuring and conceptualizing pro-environmental behavior. The traditional method for measuring pro-environmental behavior is to measure dozens of self-reported behaviors and create a composite mean, but this approach assumes the behaviors are caused by an underlying latent variable. Most previous studies assumed that pro-environmental behavior is a coherent psychological variable, but recent work suggests behaviors may not be a psychological variable at all: they are not mental constructs, are diverse, and have distinct causes. This view is consistent with recent research simultaneously assessing multiple types of pro-environmental measures, because those behavior measures do not correlate highly. He will expand this point to other psychological variables and discuss the implications of these for psychological theory and research.
