Recycling Flashcards
What are Conservation Behaviours ?
Any behaviours that help minimise damage to the environment
What are Light Green Conservation Behaviours ?
- Concerned with actions at individual level
- Focus on recycling, insulating homes and buying local produce.
- Believe the aim should be to make the current model of global capitalism more sustainable
- Continuing to live in a similar, but less-damaging way.
What are Dark Green Conservation Behaviours ?
- Want societal change
- Creation of sustainable communities where people work where they live, grow their own food and generate their own electricity.
What are examples of conservation behaviours?
- At home – smaller houses, energy efficient appliances, insulation and double glazing, less use of heating.
- Travel – using public transport, walking or cycling,
- Lifestyle – avoiding single-use packaging, drinking tap water, vegetarianism
What influences recycling behaviour?
- Situational and individual factors
- Situational factors include the availability of recycling facilities
- Individual factors include cognitive factors like perceived cost vs benefits and attitudes towards recycling and social factors like peer pressure.
What is Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour ?
- Says behaviours are the result of behavioural intentions, which are influenced by:
- Attitudes towards the behaviour – comprising beliefs about the outcome and the evaluation of the outcomes.
- Subjective norms – beliefs about the attitudes of others to the behaviour and whether this motivates the them to comply with their views.
- Perceived behavioural control – how easy or difficult will it be to achieve goals bearing in mind internal, external and past experiences
What does Skinner suggest ?
- Positive reinforcement was more effective than punishment
- It encourages the desired behaviours, rather than just discouraging undesired actions.
What are the different reinforcers in operant conditioning ?
- Primary reinforcers – things which are naturally reinforcing in themselves (like food, water, sex)
- Secondary reinforcers – become reinforcing because of their association with primary reinforcers – for example money which allows us to buy nice things.
- Operant conditioning would suggest we need to offer positive reinforcement – perhaps in terms of secondary reinforcers to influence people’s tendency to conserve or recycle.
What are Antecedent strategies ?
-Occur before the behaviour they are trying to change, such as information campaigns to change attitudes, the use of prompts like signs or obtaining pledges from people about their behaviour.
What are Consequent strategies ?
-Occur after the behaviour, such as deposits for returning bottles, fines for littering, cancellation of contracts with polluting companies.
How do information campaigns help to encourage recycling ?
- These are based on the idea that it is a lack of knowledge holding people back from acting.
- This could be about the importance of the issue or the action they could take.
- But studies have shown education does not seem to be enough
- Heberlein (1975) found it didn’t matter in what form information was given there were no significant changes in energy-saving behaviour.
What is The Yale Model of Persuasion ?
-Four major factors involved in persuasive communication.
-The source – needs to be credible, attractive and trustworthy.
-The message – well-educated audiences need a both sides of the argument, less well-educated audiences need only one for optimum persuasion. Messages shouldn’t been too fear arousing.
-The recipient – if the audience is already committed to an existing position and resistant to change, smaller attitude changes should be attempted. If the audience does not have strong views, greater changes can be sought.
The situation – informal situations are more effective because in group contexts participants can be more easily required to make a commitment.
What are three stages to an effective communication ?
- Attention to the message
- Comprehension of the message
- Acceptance of the message.
How do prompts help to recycle ?
- Another antecedent behaviour – usually signs to trigger desired behaviours.
- Attractive and unusual prompts can be very effective, such as the ‘gum’ posters in Bournemouth encouraging people to stick their gum to a picture, rather than spitting it on the floor.
- Studies have also shown polite messages are more effective – harder messages seem to encourage people to resist.
How does Proximity help to recycle ?
-This is simply making it easy to recycle by putting facilities close by.
