Abstract
University students in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) are the main force and future leaders of the construction industry, and their values shape the model and direction of the industry’s future development. The construction industry is the largest contributor of waste and greenhouse gas emissions. However, there is an inconsistency between AEC university students’ perceptions and behaviors regarding sustainability, which has received little attention. This study attempts to shed light on the root causes of the inconsistency from the psychological perspective, incorporating construal level (CL) theory and psychological distance (PD) theory into situational settings of the experiment. We recruited 556 AEC students from 20 different universities to participate in data collection. Research findings revealed that PD has a significant influence on AEC students’ recycling behavior with variance in the effect of different dimensions, even though CL has no significant impact. Furthermore, findings show that spatial distance poses the greatest impact on AEC student recycling behavior, followed by information distance, temporal distance, experience distance, hypothetical distance, and social distance. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by introducing CL and PD into sustainability perception and behavior research in construction and has practical implications for universities with sustainability curricula in AEC.
Highlights
By manipulating the six psychological distance (PD) dimensions and construal level (CL), the descriptions of specific situational contexts of PD under different CLs were used to assess their impact on the sustainable behavior of university students in the AEC fields
Based on the collected experimental data and statistical analysis, the research shows that the average score of perception regarding the importance of sustainability is 4.53, the average score of willingness to recycle is 3.12, and the p-value of the t-test is 1.52 × 10−141 < 0.05, indicating that the research hypothesis is supported and that there is significant inconsistency between university students’ perceptions and behaviors in terms of sustainability
Experiments with the designed settings that incorporated PD dimensions were used to analyze the impact of PD and CL on recycling behavior decisions
Summary
The annual output of municipal solid waste in China has exceeded 150 million tons and is continuously increasing at a rate of 8–10%, which makes China a major contributor of waste [1]. Modern technology can reduce and treat harmful waste, with the continuous increase in waste production, disposal facilities are facing overloaded operations. As landfill capacity is limited and waste occupies a huge area, it generates conflicts between the number of humans and the amount of land in cities [2]. Public distrust of waste treatment facilities has made it difficult to select sites for disposal of urban domestic waste [4]. The conflicts between humans and accessible land, environmental issues, and other social conflicts are forcing humans to recycle, thereby reducing the amount of waste originally generated [5,6]
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