Why Good People Do Bad Environmental Things by Elizabeth R. DeSombre

Author:Elizabeth R. DeSombre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

GENESIS OF VALUES, ATTITUDES, AND IDENTITY

Values, attitudes, and identity are generally formed early in life and tend to be stable over time.16 That makes them a tricky tool for environmental persuasion. On the one hand, if you can contribute to the formation of these attitudinal frameworks in a person or a population, they are likely to endure. On the other hand, there may be few opportunities to create them because people are not routinely seeking new ones. How are they formed in the first place?

Value orientations are probably first created by socialization processes in childhood; families and early experiences play a strong role. Attitudes are formed from feelings, beliefs, and behavior.17 People read their attitudes from their feelings. Beliefs (often referred to in the scholarly literature as “cognition”) are the nonemotional understandings that underpin attitudes.18 Education may contribute to values through this belief function. There is evidence that the more people know about the environment, the more they have favorable environmental attitudes.19

Past behavior, especially direct experience, contributes to the development of attitudes. More interesting, though, is the role of indirect experience.20 People who form attitudes from hearing about something they did not themselves experience have attitudes about it that are more polarized, less nuanced, and more extreme than are those attitudes that come from direct experience.21 It may be that hearing about something rather than experiencing it fails to communicate contextual or mitigating information that would allow a more nuanced understanding of it. If this effect holds for environmental attitudes, about which we rarely have much direct experience, it can help explain the polarization on issues like climate change.

These emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of attitudes may be difficult to disaggregate. Think of attending a rally for an environmental cause. You may enjoy the communal aspect of a rally (the “feelings” component), believe that it will have a positive effect on creating an environmental policy you want implemented (the “belief” component),22 or remember that you have previously attended rallies and conclude that you support attending rallies. Or, having attended this one and enjoyed it, you will then conclude that you favor rallies.23

Identity is related to these concepts. One way to think of identity is as something we adopt to create coherence across our attitudes and behaviors, as well as others’ expectations of us.24 As with attitudes, past behavior plays a role in identity creation: one of the ways we come to understand our own self-identities is through observation of our own behavior. We then rationalize this behavior into a coherent identity.25 Habit thus can also contribute: behaviors that are undertaken repeatedly are key candidates for identity formation. Someone who does something repeatedly (such as bicycling or binge drinking) comes to self-identify as the sort of person who does those types of things.26 From an analytical perspective it can be difficult to determine whether it is the habit or the identity that causes the behavior going forward (since the two interrelate in this context). A study of binge drinking, for instance,

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