Abstract
AbstractThis chapter provides an overview of the theoretical approaches to environmental attitudes and behaviors. It includes a discussion of different scales and surveys used in other programs with a focus on this topic. Scales measuring general environmental behavior, just like items in surveys, tend to focus on behavioral intentions and are correlated with environmentally friendly attitudes. In contrast, emission-related behavior depends more on context and socio-demographic characteristics and is rarely asked in surveys. Gaps frequently occur between environmental attitudes and general behaviors—the value-action gap—and between environmental behaviors and the actual ecological consequences of actions—the behavior-impact gap. Finally, previous results and problems encountered in the validation of self-reports on environmental behavior are highlighted.
Highlights
Distinguish between the affective, the cognitive, and the conative dimensions (Maloney & Ward, 1973; Diekmann & Preisendörfer, 1998)
The concept of environmental attitudes is broader in the latter approaches since the level of knowledge and the level of behavioral intentions are seen as part of the attitudes
The authors labeled this perspective the Human Exceptionalism Paradigm (HEP) and believed that it is the reason why sociology struggles to deal with the social implications of ecological problems
Summary
This chapter discusses the basis of our approach, situating it in the existing research on environmental attitudes and behaviors and presenting related scales and surveys. The concepts of environmental attitudes and behaviors are discussed with a special emphasis on behavior that has an impact on the environment. The key empirical findings on the factors shaping these attitudes and behaviors will be presented. We describe the measurement variants of these dimensions. The focus is on the measurement of environmental attitudes and behaviors in surveys and on the sub-dimension of emissions-related behavior, which has rarely been included in social science surveys. Obstacles to the inclusion of emission-relevant questions in the survey context are identified
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