The supportive role of environmental attitude for learning about environmental issues

Abstract

People's commitment to environmental preservation (i.e., environmental attitude) appears to be critical for manifest engagement. Correspondingly, it seems advisable that environmental scientists, educators, and policy-makers also pay heed to environmental attitude's role in learning, another form of manifest behavior. In our research, we tested the hypothesis that people with stronger environmental attitudes learn comparatively more about environmental issues than people with weaker such attitudes. In a sample of 1,896 students (M = 14.2, SD = 1.8), we identified people's environmental attitudes in their verbal expressions of support for preserving the environment and their self-reports of past behavior aimed at preserving the environment. We corroborated our hypothesis and found that people's preexisting environmental attitudes supported their acquisition of new knowledge. We also corroborated the characteristic developmental trajectory of adolescents' environmental attitudes with an early maximum at around age 11 or 12, a minimum at around age 16, and a subsequent recovery.