INSTITUTE OF PSYCHOLOGY

Available free of charge at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.101997

Kaiser, F. G., Gerdes, R. & König, F. (2023). Supporting and expressing support for environmental policies. Journal of Environmental Psycholo­gy, 87, 101997.

Abstract:

People engage in all kinds of behaviors because they aim to protect the environment. Among other actions, such behaviors involve supporting and expressing support for environmental policies. In this article, we investigated two forces that control people's environmental policy support: their commitment to protecting the environment (conceptually speaking, people's environmental attitudes) and the corollaries of a policy (i.e., policy-specific costs) that need to be offset by an individual's environmental attitude. We surveyed two convenience samples (N₁ = 248; N₂ = 176) on their support for a whole array of different environmental policies that came with various costly corollaries and, more specifically, for a range of CO₂ taxes. We found that verbal expressions of support for environmental policies reflect people's environmental attitudes, and we subsequently corroborated this finding in a preregistered replication (N = 450). Fittingly, we also found that people who express support for higher CO₂ taxes hold progressively stronger environmental attitudes.

Highlights:

-Citizens' support for effective environmental policies is crucial in democracies.

-Expressing support for a policy is behavior aimed at protecting the environment.

-Environmental policy support is controlled by a person's environmental attitude.

-Support is also controlled by the costs that accompany a specific policy.

-Only a populace with strong environmental attitudes supports effective policies.

In a short Q&A session with Maria Bolevich from TheDeepness.org Prof. Kaiser answers questions about his paper "The supportive role of environmental attitude for learning about environmental issues". Find the Q&A session here.

New publication!

Urban, J. & Kaiser, F. G. (2022). Environmental attitudes in 28 European countries de­rived from atheoretically compiled opinions and self-reports of behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 875419.

Available free of charge at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.875419

Abstract:

People differ in their personal commitment to fighting climate change and protecting the environment. The question is, can we validly measure people’s commitment by what they say and what they claim they do in opinion polls? In our research, we demonstrate that opinions and reports of past behavior can be aggregated into comparable depictions of people’s personal commitment to fighting climate change and protecting the environment (i.e., their environmental attitudes). In contrast to the commonly used operational scaling approaches, we ground our measure of people’s environmental attitudes in a mathematically formalized psychological theory of the response process—the Campbell paradigm. This theory of the response process has already been extensively validated, and its relevance for manifest behavior has repeatedly been shown as well. In our secondary analysis of Eurobarometer data (N = 27,998) from 28 European countries, we apply the Campbell paradigm to a set of indicators that was not originally collected to be aggregated into a single scale. With our research, we propose a distinct way to measure behavior-relevant environmental attitudes that can be used even with a set of indicators that was originally atheoretically compiled. Overall, our study suggests that the Campbell paradigm provides a sound psychological measurement theory that can be applied to cross-cultural comparisons in the environmental protection domain.

In his invited keynote ad­dress at the Leuven Institute of Advanced Study in Leuven, Belgium, Prof. Florian Kaiser talks about what environmentally protective behavior is and how we can support it. Watch the talk here.