Abstract
Recycled water has been widely recognized in the world as an effective approach to relieve the issue of water shortage. Meanwhile, with several decades of development, the insufficiency of technology is no longer the primary factor that restricts the popularization of recycled water. What makes it difficult to promote the concept of reusing recycled water in China? To solve this issue, a special experiment on the public’s attitude towards the reuse of recycled water was designed based on a Single Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT), so as to avoid factors like social preference that can influence the survey results, and to gain the public’s negative implicit attitude towards reusing recycled water reuse, which is close to the public’s real attitude to it. From the perspective of implicit attitude, this research testifies the “spiritual contagion” phenomenon of the public, which refers to refusing recycled water reuse because recycled water is made from sewage treatment. By comparing the implicit attitude to recycled water reuse with the explicit attitude that is acquired from self-reporting questionnaires about reusing recycled water, this research finds that the implicit attitude is more positive than the explicit attitude, which accounts for the phenomenon of “best game no one played” in the promotion of the recycled water reuse, that is, the public though applauding the environment-friendly policy, will not actually use the recycled water.
Highlights
With the development of the economy, the increase of population and the improvement of people’s life quality, water consumption and pollution have greatly increased, which even go beyond the limits of the Earth’s carrying capacity, and result in irreversible damage to ecological systems [1].The restrictions brought about by water resources and water environments’ carrying capacity to the social and economic development have become an important issue that must be considered in the21st century
Recycled water supply is more stable than natural water resources that depend on precipitation
In the summarizing of the explicit data, it is found that the mean value gets to 79.284 (SD = 9.511), which is much higher than 50 points. It shows that the participants have a positive preference for recycled water. Comparing it with the implicit attitude obtained before, we find that the explicit attitude is more positive than implicit attitude, so Hypothesis 2 is tenable
Summary
With the development of the economy, the increase of population and the improvement of people’s life quality, water consumption and pollution have greatly increased, which even go beyond the limits of the Earth’s carrying capacity, and result in irreversible damage to ecological systems [1].The restrictions brought about by water resources and water environments’ carrying capacity to the social and economic development have become an important issue that must be considered in the21st century. Recycled water supply is more stable than natural water resources that depend on precipitation. It can be used as a new source of water and can help to reduce water pollution, so it becomes an important alternative to natural water resources [2,3]. During this phase of the experiment, the participants are invited to complete the SC-IAT response task on recycled water with a computer pre-installed with the E-prime 2.0 application The implicit attitude of recycled water reuse of SC-IAT test participants was adopted.
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