Perhaps the most obvious driving factor in any behaviour is value. The extent a person attributes ‘value’ to something can be a basis for the end behaviour. This isn’t always monetary (intrinsic) value either (though value is often linked to how much we paid for it). In their book ‘Conservation Psychology; understanding and promoting human care for nature’, Clayton and Myers (2011) discuss some of the key factors that drive our behaviour towards the environment, They state that how a person cares (or values) for the environment provides the baseline for any future behaviour.
However, value, like a lot of things, can be broken down into different catergories, or types of value. Heberlein (2012) discussed three types of value; altruistic, biospheric and egotistic. Which value a person attributes to something will affect what their behaviour would be.
Altruistic values; when a person values something as it is of benefit to others. Selfless.
Biospheric values; when a person values something because it is of benefit to the environment and ecosystem.
Egotistic values; when a person values something because it benefits themselves or improves their quality of live.
While on the face of it, Altruistic and Biospheric values seem like the best to avoid being selfish ( a trait that is commonly negatively thought of). A combination of all is key to a healthy and sustainable lifestyle. It is also key to consider all when looking at behaviour and in particular behaviour change. If you can show someone how their own life can be improved, it can be a much more effective approach to encouraging behaviour change over showing how the life of others, or the environment can be improved. As I stated in the first post of the series, society is, at it's core, selfish, not through any fault of their own, it is the system we live in that favours the 1% over others, so people have to behave in whatever way benefits them to survive, so targeting behaviour change through this is effective. There are circumstances, where value for others or the environment/animals can be effective. The growing trend of veganism has been borne out of a growing understanding within society of the suffering felt by animals within the industry, as well as multiple research papers highlighting the negative impact the meat & diary industry has on the environment as a whole. But for those who don't value animal life sufficiently, or the environment, this alone won't change their behaviour and a more egotisical approach should be considered (personal health, financial, ease of purchasing etc.)
While it can be broken into the above variations, value is a theme that runs through conservation psychology and behavioural theories. Simply put, if you value something, you are more likely to behave in a way that will preserve/conserve/protect that thing, whether it is material possession, a loved one, a pet or the environment. Pretty basic, right?
Except it isn’t quite so straight forward as that. Look around society today where, more than ever, environmental concern has grown to the extent there are more and more documentaries, news stories and protests. But what progress have we really made? Arguably none, maybe a little? Some areas more than others for certain. The most progress has, perhaps, been made in renewable energy sector, but that isn’t really a society driven change, it is top down, with commitments by governments to the Paris Agreement, to cut emissions.
When we look at society, you see little change. People carrying on in their day to day life without giving the environment the real consideration it needs for real effect. A few years ago, Blue Planet 2, a BBC documentary narrated by David Attenborough, came out. This documentary was fantastic, showing some amazing footage of life in our oceans like we have never seen before, but also turning a focus towards the threat of plastic pollution to our oceans, and all life.
Cue a surge in plastic warrior efforts; increased numbers of litter picks, more people getting behind the Greta Thunberg climate change protests and people vowing to cut out unnecessary plastic from their lives, all brilliant outcomes of the documentary and to be applauded. However, a few weeks/months later, for a lot of people, it was forgotten and people were back to using the same unnecessary plastic in the forms of bottles, cups, straws etc. The BBC documentary about our plastic oceans lying forgotten, or at least ignored because of the extra effort needed by us as individuals to make the change.
Fast forward to 2021 and the newest documentary ‘Seaspiracy’ creates a storm of debate and concern for our oceans again. This time, the documentary (which has been widely argued against by marine biologists and conservationists) focused on overfishing as the cause of a dying ocean.I learnt about overfishing in university in 2009-11 so it isn’t something that has only just been discovered, it isn’t something unheard of but this is perhaps the first time (beyond Hugh’s Fish Fight) where people were made aware of it on such a scale.
Like with the release of Blue Planet. We have see a sudden boom in people giving up fish because of its effect on the ocean. We (wife and I) haven’t eaten fish since 2015, where we first became properly involved in ocean conservation and the issues of plastic, and I won’t argue that more people eating less fish is a great outcome of this documentary. I won’t go as far as to say it’s the magical fix to our problems due to the many more issues; ocean dead zones because of animal agriculture, ocean acidification and temperature changes due to climate change (arguably the true biggest threat to our oceans, and life on Earth), deforestation and litter/pollution. When we consider behaviour change as a result of these types of documentary we have to consider, for most people, it'll be short term change.
These two examples of interventions, that is, approaches to change behaviour, are what I’d call ‘shock tactics’. It is commonly used to encourage engagement with the public. Band Aid, Comic Relief and Animal Cruelty organisations will often use footage of starving children, abused or starving animals as a means to 'connect' with people and create a level of altruistic/biospheric value sufficient enough to donate money. Not many people will watch a video or see an image and have it change their lifestyle and behaviour unless they are already moving in the direction of change. The attention span is short, and we can feed our ego's and lessen our guilt through donating money, while going about our normal lives.
The importance of values in pro-environmental behaviour is obvious and arguably society has a reasonable value for our natural environment which continues to grow, but they don’t necessarily behave accordingly (often because of egotistic values for other elements in their life). This is perhaps highlighted very well by Heberlein (2012) who discussed a story of Aldo Leopold, an American Author and Environmentalist (amongst other things), in his book ‘Navigating Environmental Attitudes’.
Aldo Leopold wrote a great deal about the environment and often wrote passionately about wolves, but when given an opportunity to vote, he voted in favour of paying people to hunt and kill the few remaining wolves; strange considering the numerous writings implying he had a strong biospheric value for wolves. However, a further study of his writings can find older works detailing his disdain for wolves. This indicates that although his attitude was changing (to become more pro-environment), it was not perhaps strong enough to counter the public backlash (societal norms) from hunters should he vote against them.
This story of Aldo Leopold shows that there exists a gap between attitudes and values and behaviour, one that can be explained partly based on the type of value we associate with something, and partly based on other driving factors behind behaviour: belief and norms.But while gaps exist, it is imperative that efforts are made to improve societal values for everything, the documentaries above, particularly the Blue Planet and other BBC series' are fantastic at creating value for the environment, but they fail to link those values of a beautiful ocean to peoples lives, so the values remain quite biospheric and distant.
This link between our values and our behaviour falls under the 'Belief' section of the Value Belief Norm theory and is the topic for discussion in the next blog post.
References
* Clayton, S. and Myers, G. (2009) Conservation Psychology: Understanding and Promoting Human Care for Nature. 1st edn. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.
* Heberlein, T. (2012) Navigating Environmental Attitudes. Oxford University Press
* Stern, P. C. et al. (1999) ‘A Value-Belief-Norm Theory of Support for Social Movements : The Case of Environmentalism’, Research in Human Ecology, 6(2), pp. 81–97.
* Stern, P. C. (2000) ‘Toward a Coherent Theory of Environmentally Significant Behavior’, Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), pp. 407–424.
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