Abstract
Environmental challenges are often marked by an intergroup dimension. Political conservatives and progressives are divided on their beliefs about climate change, farmers come into conflict with scientists and environmentalists over water allocation or species protection, and communities oppose big business and mining companies that threaten their local environment. These intergroup tensions are reminders of the powerful influence social contexts and group memberships can have on attitudes, beliefs, and actions relating to climate change and the environment more broadly. In this paper, we use social identity theory to help describe and explain these processes. We review literature showing, how conceiving of oneself in terms of a particular social identity influences our environmental attitudes and behaviors, how relations between groups can impact on environmental outcomes, and how the content of social identities can direct group members to act in more or less pro-environmental ways. We discuss the similarities and differences between the social identity approach to these phenomena and related theories, such as cultural cognition theory, the theory of planned behavior, and value-belief-norm theory. Importantly, we also advance social-identity based strategies to foster more sustainable environmental attitudes and behaviors. Although this theoretical approach can provide important insights and potential solutions, more research is needed to build the empirical base, especially in relation to testing social identity solutions.
Highlights
The seriousness of environmental issues currently facing the world is increasing despite substantial research attention and the efforts of local, national and international environmental organizations
These examples highlight an intergroup dimension of environmental issues: support or opposition to certain environmental issues can hinge on which group you identify with and groups regularly come into conflict over environmental issues
Our aim in the current article is to draw on the social identity approach (Tajfel and Turner, 1979; Turner et al, 1987; Hogg and Abrams, 1988; Hornsey, 2008) as a way to understand the influence of group membership on environmental attitudes and behavior
Summary
The seriousness of environmental issues currently facing the world is increasing despite substantial research attention and the efforts of local, national and international environmental organizations. Social Identity and the Environment issues more broadly; Dunlap et al, 2001; Dunlap and McCright, 2008) is not the only divide in the environmental domain: farmers and scientists come into conflict over water allocation (Poff et al, 2003), communities oppose expansion of mining, because of threats to the local environment (Urkidi, 2010), and rural landholders oppose environmentalists on the protection or reintroduction of threatened species (Wilson, 1997; Opotow and Brook, 2003) These examples highlight an intergroup dimension of environmental issues: support or opposition to certain environmental issues can hinge on which group you identify with and groups regularly come into conflict over environmental issues.
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