Concepedia

Environmental Values, Beliefs, and Actions

Environment and Behavior · 2000 · 443 citations · 23 references

TL;DR

The study examined how personal and situational variables interact to influence environmental behavior and the predictive power of values and beliefs. The authors surveyed 125 undergraduate students with questions on environmental beliefs, Schwartz values, physical‑environmental inhibition, general concern, and a 16‑item action list. Results show that environmental behavior depends on the interaction of personal and situational variables; when conflict is high, attitudes predict poorly, but when consistent, they predict strongly; the importance of situational variables varies by action, with some actions driven by situational factors and others by commitment or moral obligation.

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of the interaction between personal and situational variables in environmental behavior and the predictive power of values and beliefs. Three different kinds of questions (environmental beliefs, Schwartz’s measure of values, and physical-environmental inhibition level) and 1 item of general environmental concern were presented, along with a 16-item list of environmental actions, to 125 randomly selected undergraduate students. The results permit two main conclusions. First, environmental behavior depends on personal and situational variables in an interactive way. Second, when high conflict level is generated between personal dispositions and situational conditions, the predictive power of attitudes tends to be minimal, whereas in the case of consistency between them it tends to be maximal. The influence of situational variables was found to depend on the environmental action considered. In some cases, situational variables were the most important, whereas in others, commitment or moral obligation played an essential role.