Elisabeth Kals

Emotional Affinity toward Nature as a Motivational Basis to Protect Nature

Nature-protective behavior cannot be sufficiently explained using a pure rational/cognitive approach. Therefore, in a questionnaire study (N = 281), the focus was on emotional motivations of this behavior, especially on a newly conceptualized construct: emotional affinity toward nature. All constructs were measured by reliable and valid scales. Multiple regression analyses reveal that (a) emotional affinity is as powerful to predict nature-protective behavior as indignation and interest in nature and together these three predictors explain up to 47% of variance of the criterion variables, and (b) 39% of emotional affinity toward nature traces back to present and past experiences in natural environments. The resulting integrative path model is discussed. Theoretical conclusions are drawn, and options for practical intervention are derived.

Sustainable Development and Emotions

To establish national and worldwide sustainable development, changes in individual behavior patterns and decision-making processes are necessary. We argue that environment-specific cognitions and emotions are decisive for sustainable behavior and environment endangering decisions. Data show that the influential cognitions and emotions do not represent a self centered, but rather a moral perspective. Cognitions like environment-specific control beliefs, ecological responsibility attributions, environmental justice appraisals and environment-specific moral emotions, such as indignation about insufficient sustainable political decision-making, are the most powerful predictors for sustainable behavior. Other emotional categories, for example, emotional affinity towards nature, have additional effects. In sum, the neglected emotional perspective on sustainable behavior needs to be included on the level of model building, as well as on the practical level of intervention programs. Corresponding guidelines are formulated at the end of the chapter.

Ecological Risks and Community Perceptions of Fairness and Justice: A Cross‐Cultural Model

Intergenerational justice is implicit in international commitments to sustainability. If ecological, economic, and social components of sustainability are to be achieved, there is a necessity for intergenerational justice considerations to be included in decision making. The present generations risk judgments should include consideration of the possible outcomes for their children. But intergenerational issues cannot be considered in isolation from other current risk and fairness concerns. This article reports on a community-based integrative model that describes justice and other attitudes and motivations that determine community and individual proenvironmental behavior in two nations: Germany and Australia. This model can account for a considerable amount of the variance in political compliance as well as various proenvironmental behaviors. Group or individual self-interests have nearly no effects on global protective behavior. It is shown that universal as well as contextual principles, including distributive (within or between generations), procedural, and interactive justice, play a crucial role in fairness judgments. Other principles are also taken into account, such as efficiency, environmental rights, and rights to economic welfare. The results are discussed in relation to the importance of complex community fairness judgments in predicting and evaluating acceptance of political decisions, and for promoting proenvironmental behavior.

Perceived Justice of Ecological Policy and Proenvironmental Commitments

A model was outlined (i) to explain readiness to proenvironmental commitments and decisions in everyday life by six categories of predictor variables, including justice appraisals of pollution control, basic rights, appraisals of pollution, of pollution causation, of the efficacy of pollution control measures, and of ecological responsibility, and (ii) to generate hypotheses on the relationships between the predictor variables. Model variables were assessed by a questionnaire study (N=518) referring to the problem of air pollution. Proenvironmental commitments and decisions could be well predicted by morally relevant appraisals, especially by justice appraisals (e.g., approving proenvirommental laws, taxes, and subsidies, rejecting the justice of the current environmental policy and of mere appeals), whereas predictors representing self-protective motivations remained insignificant. Justice appraisals are in line with the “causation principle of justice”: Those who caused the pollution are made responsible for its reduction and should pay the costs for the pollution control. Results demonstrate that justice appraisals are essential determinants of peoples ecologically relevant emotions, cognitions, and engagements. Moreover, they reveal that the responsibility for pollution control is not left with state and economy but is also regarded as a matter that concerns the citizens.

Are Proenvironmental Commitments Motivated by Health Concerns or by Perceived Justice

Environmental Psychology is a relatively young discipline. Within this discipline, new approaches to handling justice relevant questions on preserving the natural environment were developed (“questions of socioecological justice”). As an introduction to this research field, its premises are discussed first. Subsequently, an overview of environmentally oriented justice relevant research questions is provided.

Individual Conceptions of Justice and Their Potential for Explaining Proenvironmental Decision Making

In Germany, community-based climate-protective decisions were measured on micro up to macro levels, and the role justice appraisals play in decision-making was investigated in comparison to responsibility-related and self-centered motives. Results reveal that in the field of carbon dioxide emission, gaps between those who are gaining profits and those who have to suffer from negative side effects are recognized by the community on a national as well as an international level. For gaining behavioral impact, the perception of these gaps needs to be regarded under a moral perspective and considered unjust. These justice appraisals are shown to be stable predictors of climate-protective commitments, even when powerful responsibility-related variables were included in the regression analyses. Self-centered motives proved to be of minor importance.

Willingness for Continued Social Commitment A New Concept in Environmental Research

This article validates that the willingness for continued commitment (WCC) is a predictor for manifest action, situated within the theory of continued social commitment and based on a longitudinal study (N = 204) on pollution control. The authors found that the predictive power of WCC can be increased further by taking into account volitional aspects of behavior, including means, aims, and contexts—categories derived from the rubicon Model of Action. In previous research, the authors had found that WCC to proenvironmental behavior depends mainly on a set of cognitive appraisals and emotions related to norms and responsibilities. In the present study (N = 558), the authors show WCC to mediate most of the effects of these responsibility and norm-related predictors and to interact with situational and social context factors in predicting manifest behavior. The authors conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications of these findings for explaining and influencing proenvironmental behavior.

Health Behavior: An Interlocking Personal and Social Task

Traditional health behavior models comprise only person-centered motivational components such as personal vulnerability perceptions and specific internal control beliefs. However, such factors as social responsibility, perceived prevalence rates of illnesses, attribution of control to societal agencies, and the motivation to engage oneself for public health concerns are not unrelated to individual health protection. Therefore, an alternative model is proposed, which combines traditional self-centered and social variables. This alternative model was empirically confirmed in a questionnaire study exemplified by cancer preventive activities (N = 558), which embraced personal cancer prevention as well as efforts to reduce the cancer prevalence within the general population. The readiness to engage in personal cancer preventive measures appeared to be closely related to the readiness to engage oneself for public health programs. The motivational predictors of both categories of activities had significant overlap. Implications for model building and intervention strategies to promote individual as well as public health behavior are discussed.

Willingness to Support Traffic Policy Measures: The Role of Justice

In order to more efficiently reduce the negative impacts of traffic on society, profound changes are necessary. These changes will need to be implemented on different levels of society, including on a political level, where mainly structural decisions concerning the fundamental management of traffic are made. These decisions also frame the range of behavioral options of citizens as well as the relative quality of various modes of transport. On an individual level, every citizen is able to contribute to the solution of traffic problems in his/her everyday life. Although these 2 levels are strongly connected, this chapter examines the individual level in somewhat more detail.

Volunteering as a Means to an Equal End? The Impact of a Social Justice Function on Intention to Volunteer

ABSTRACT In the present study, we combined components of the theory of planned behavior and the functional approach to predict the social sector volunteering intention of nonvolunteers (N = 513). Moreover, we added a new other-oriented “social justice function” to the Volunteer Functions Inventory of Clary and colleagues (1998), which contains mainly self-oriented functions. We distinguished the social justice function from the other five measured volunteer functions in confirmatory factor analysis, and showed its incremental validity in predicting intention to volunteer beyond established constructs such as self-efficacy, subjective norm, and the five volunteer functions. This study suggests that emphasizing potential social justice improvements by means of volunteering may attract new volunteers.