Environmentalism and Psychology

Question 1

Describe Climate Change

Answer 1

• the study of regional and global climate as a system.
• Driven by a need to understand how our climate is changing.

-One-way causality between the total Greenhouse Gases and the annual global mean surface temperature anomalies since 1850 (Stips et al., 2016).

• How increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels will affect global temperatures
  Impact of this on ecosystems and human life – at a global, regional and local scale

Question 2

Identify the negative impacts of Climate Change.

Answer 2

• Melting sea ice
• Sea level rise
• North Atlantic drift shutdown
• Tropical forest fires
• Emissions from wetlands, permafrost and oceans: increased temperatures will release more organic greenhouse gases, potentially in a vicious circle.
• Extreme temperatures

Question 3

What are the impacts of Climate Change on human and natural systems.

Answer 3

• Coasts and oceans
• Ecosystems and biodiversity
• Fresh water
• Agriculture and food security
• Human health
• We are already experiencing these effects:
• Floods in Bangladesh
• May 2022: displaced nearly 4 million people
  One of the areas most vulnerable to the impacts of global warming and climate change (Moniruzzaman, 2012).

Question 4

What do Environmental Psychologists believe?

Answer 4

• ‘‘environmental problems’’ are all caused by maladaptive human behaviour.
  Koger and Scott (2007)

Question 5

Explain what is meant by Environmentalism.

Answer 5

• A social movement that seeks to influence the political process by lobbying, activism, and education in order to protect natural resources and ecosystems.
• Environmental protection through sustainability.
• Thoughts, attitudes, feelings, values, norms, and decisions driving unsustainable actions (Gifford, 2011) become important to study
  Psychology has a historical interest in the environment, but one that has evolved over time.

Question 6

Describe the emergence of Environmentalism and Psychology (1970s)

Answer 6

• Environmental Psychology
• Concerns about pollution
• Emergence of nature-related topics - e.g., how spending time in nature restores people’s ability to pay attention and cope with stress (Berman, Jonides, & Kaplan, 2008; Gifford, 2014)

Question 7

Describe the emergence of Environmentalism and Psychology (1990s)- Ecopsychologists

Answer 7

• Argued that modern living erodes people’s connection to nature, leaving them developmentally deprived and psychologically distressed (Roszak, 1992; Roszak, Gomes, & Kanner, 1995).
• (some) clinicians incorporated ecopsychological therapies into their practices.

Question 8

Describe Modern day Conservation Psychology (Clayton & Saunders, 2012)

Answer 8

• interactive relationships between humans and the rest of nature.
• focus on applying psychological theory and research to enhance conservation of natural resources.
• How can we ‘use’ the traditional branches of psychology (primarily social, behavioural and cognitive) to promote pro-environmental behaviours and decrease anti-environmental behaviour.

Question 9

What are the components of Conservation Psychology? (Koger & Scott, 2016)
‘environmental’ problems are actually behavioural problems.

Answer 9

• What’s bad for the planet is bad for human health and well-being.
• what’s good for the planet is good for human health and well-being
  relevance and timeliness of integrating psychology and sustainability.
• Psychology has a moral imperative to solve contemporary social problem.

Question 10

What are the components of Conservation Psychology? (2)
(What’s bad for the planet is bad for human health and well-being)

Answer 10

• global warming is widely recognized as the ‘‘biggest global health threat of the twenty-first century” (Costello et al., 2009, p. 1693)
• chemical pollutants linked to birth defects, developmental/intellectual disabilities, Parkinson’s disease, various forms of cancer, immunosuppression, and reproductive abnormalities (see reviews in Grandjean & Landrigan, 2014).
• Epidemic prevalence of mental health challenges such as depression, anxiety, and substance use/abuse is linked to materialistic values and resource overconsumption (Brown & Kasser, 2005).
• possibly due to psychological disconnection from the natural world (Conn, 1998; Roszak et al., 1995)

Question 11

What are the components of Conservation Psychology? (3)
(What’s good for the planet is good for human health and well-being).

Answer 11

• ‘‘sustainable’’ practices including experiences in natural settings promote healthy child development, subjective well-being, and other measures of health promotion and reduced stress.
• Examples such as air quality; physical activity; social cohesion
  Shown by the model on the next slide…

Question 12

What are the components of Conservation Psychology? (4)
(relevance and timeliness of integrating psychology and sustainability)

Answer 12

• Psychologists are increasingly applying their expertise to environmental issues.
• The American Psychological Association (APA) has called for psychologists to become more involved in addressing climate change (Maiser et al., 2018).
• You, as psychology students, need to explore these topics in a university curriculum – might be an increasing expectation of psychologist graduates?
• But, worth thinking about this critically:
  We need to be mindful of the limits regarding professional competence when applying theory to emerging phenomena (Swim et al., 2011).

Question 13

What are the components of Conservation Psychology?
(Psychology has a moral imperative to solve contemporary social problem).

Answer 13

• we have a shared responsibility to help create a more sustainable society (Harré, 2011)
  Taps into the ideas at the heart of this module – it is ‘right’ to apply the accumulated wisdom from the behavioural sciences to solving contemporary social problems

Question 14

Describe the Shifting Baseline (SBS; Soga & Gaston, 2018)

Answer 14

-involves a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environment due to a lack of experience, memory, and/or knowledge of its past condition.

• SBS is referred to as “environmental generational amnesia” (Kahn, 2002)
  Most notable when thinking about forests or species of animals

Question 15

What are the consequences of Shifting baseline syndrome?

Answer 15

Consequences:
an increased societal tolerance for progressive environmental degradation, including declining wildlife populations, loss of natural habitats, and increasing pollution

• Alters people’s expectations as to what is a desirable (i.e. worth protecting) state of the natural environment
• Setting of inappropriate targets for environmental conservation, restoration and management programs

Can SBS be overcome?

Restoration of the natural environment; education; Reduce the extinction of experience; more data

But is it really a syndrome? A problem that arises within us, as individuals?

Question 16

Describe the role of emotion (Norgaard, 2006)

Answer 16

• Public apathy on global warming has been identified as a significant concern by environmental sociologists (e.g., Brechin, 2003)
• Emotions can be a source of information and an impetus for social action
  But the desire to avoid unpleasant emotions and the need for emotion management can also prevent social movement participation.
• “Collective avoiding” as the social organization of denial
• Emotions (guilt, helplessness, fear, identity) play a key role in denial, providing much of the reason why people preferred to avoid information.

Question 17

Helplessness vs. Solutions (Their & Lin, 2022)

Answer 17

research consistently shows that the media are the public’s primary information source about risks and crises (Sellnow & Seeger, 2021).

traditional climate change journalism fails to empower audiences to press for collective and policy solutions (Hackett et al., 2017)

traditional journalistic coverage of climate change typically describes unconnected episodes and overemphasizes disasters instead of solutions

limited mention of “agency, hope and efficacy”
Is the problem in the messaging we receive?

Question 18

Solutions focused messaging

Answer 18

• The social cognitive theory of mass communication suggests that vicarious experiences increase individuals’ self-efficacy;
  that mass media influences perceived self-efficacy by modelling human behaviour;
  that perceived self and collective efficacy influence people’s incentive to act (Bandura, 2001)

Solutions journalism aims to focus on the response and its development to social problems, including evidence of: response efficacy; insight about the response’s applicability or transferability to other locations, and the response’s limitations

Their and Lin (2022): 352 students randomly allocated to read either a ‘problem’ orientated news report or a solutions focused article

Solution stories were positively associated with perceived behavioural control, which mediated support for collective action for climate change adaptation

Question 19

Describe what thinking ‘psychologically’ encompasses.

Answer 19

• Areas related to memory and perception [cognitive]
  Role of emotions (guilt, helplessness, fear, identity) [cognitive and social]
  Concepts such as self-efficacy, perceived behaviour control [behavioural]
  ‘Framing’ of solutions [social]

Question 20

Describe Additional Theoretical Perspectives

Answer 20

Availability Heuristic. Tversky and Kahneman (1973): people overestimate the likelihood and frequency of things or events that come easily to mind because they are more available in memory

availability heuristic may be responsible for both risk underestimation and risk overestimation associated with environmental hazard (Gardner & Stern, 2002)

Anchoring and Adjustment. Tversky and Kahneman (1974): people’s judgments are adjusted in relation to implicit reference points (anchors)

radical activism in general may be an extreme position on the activism spectrum (i.e. an anchor) that helps to make the less radical positions seem more moderate

Question 21

Describe the Coincidence Effect (Additional Theoretical Perspectives)

Answer 21

judgment bias in which two items that match on a single dimension but are very different on another dimension are perceived as more similar to each other than two items that are only modestly different on both dimensions (Kaplin & Medin, 1997)

Tanner and Jungbluth (2003) investigated whether the coincidence effect occurs in people’s choices about environmentally friendly food products

Question 22

Describe the False Polarisation Theory.

Answer 22

• We tend to perceive the views of those on the opposing side of a partisan debate as more extreme than they really are; to perceive opponents as more susceptible to biased thinking than we are; and to attribute negative motives to those on the opposing side of a debate (Pronin, Gilovich, & Ross, 2004)

What about those who embrace the “environmentalist” label?

Question 23

Describe the “Natural is Good”, Baron (2006)

Answer 23

describes how several environmentally specific “biases” may influence people’s ideas regarding how to deal with global climate change

“natural is good,” “the polluter pays,” “undoing harm is better than doing other good,” and “parochialism” (favouring the ingroup at the expense of outsiders and even one’s self-interest)

financial contributions that many individuals make to environmental causes seem to indicate an economic valuation of those goods

Question 24

Describe Terror Management Theory (Dickinson, 2009)

Answer 24

• model that aims to explain how people protect themselves against concerns about death
• predictions about rapidly approaching consequences drive more intense defence of cultural materialism) - to enhance personal self-esteem