News
"People waive control over their electricity consumption as a means to protect the environment" - Our findings at the Sustainability Preconference of the SPSP 2023
Q&A with Prof. Kaiser: "Improving people’s 'motivation for environmental protection' is possible but needs probably an array of measures"
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.
Environmental attitudes in 28 European countries derived from atheoretically compiled opinions and self-reports of behavior
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.
Prof. Kaiser's Keynote: "Furthering behavior that protects the environment"
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.
Opinion polls as measures of commitment to goals: Environmental attitude in Germany from 1996 to 2018
New publication!
Bauske, E., Kibbe, A. & Kaiser, F. G. (2022). Opinion polls as measures of commitment to goals: Environmental attitude in Germany from 1996 to 2018. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 81, 101805.
Available free of charge until June, 16th 2022: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1e%7EG8zzKDEWDq
Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101805
Abstract:
Can opinion polls be used to measure people's personal commitment to protecting the environment over the years, even with data that were not originally compiled from a longitudinal perspective? In a secondary analysis of 12 data sets collected over the course of 22 years and containing more than 28,000 person records, we demonstrate that opinions and reports of behavior can be aggregated into valid depictions of people's personal commitment to protecting the environment (i.e., their environmental attitudes). In contrast to traditional scaling approaches that define such measures by the item sets used for measurement, we grounded our measure in a psychological measurement theory of the response process—the Campbell paradigm. We found that the average level of environmental attitude in Germany has increased slightly since 1996. With a new sample of 1,689 respondents, we validated our estimates of people's environmental attitudes with estimates of the same people's annual CO2 emissions.
Highlights:
• People's environmental attitudes reveal commitment to environmental protection.
• Commitment to protecting the environment can be measured with opinion polls.
• Fragmented data from distinct samples can form a comparable commitment measure.
• People committed to environmental protection leave smaller carbon footprints behind.
• Since 1996, environmental attitude has been on a slow but steady rise in Germany.