Florian G. Kaiser

Restorative Experience and Self-Regulation in Favorite Places

The authors report further evidence bearing on the relations among restorative experiences, self-regulation, and place attachment. University students (n = 101) described their favorite places and experiences in them, and 98 other students described unpleasant places. Natural settings were overrepresented among favorite places and underrepresented among the unpleasant places. In open-ended accounts, frequent mention of being relaxed, being away from everyday life, forgetting worries, and reflecting on personal matters indicated a link between favorite places and restorative experience. Restoration was particularly typical of natural favorite places. Structured evaluations of being away, fascination, coherence, and compatibility indicated they were experienced to a high degree in the favorite places, although fascination to a lesser degree than compatibility. The favorite and unpleasant places differed substantially in all four restorative qualities but especially in being away and compatibility. Self-referencing appears to be more characteristic of favorite place experiences than engaging or interesting environmental properties.

Ecological Behavior's Dependency on Different Forms of Knowledge

Cet article presente trois raisons pour lesquelles l’influence de la connaissance sur le comportement ecologique est systematiquement sous-estime. Tout d’abord, ce n’est pas la simple masse de connaissances disponibles que determine le comportement: differentes formes de connaissances doivent converger pour favoriser le comportement ecologique. Ensuite, l’impact de la connaissance n’est pas detecte parce que certaines procedures statistiques ne controlent pas les erreurs de mesure ni ne revelent avec precision les influences interferentes. Enfin, les facteurs psychologiques tels que la connaissance ont apparemment une influence limitee sur le comportement ecologique en presence de fortes pressions relevant de la situation. Mais quand une evaluation du comportement ecologique fait systematiquement appel aux contraintes des situations (application d’un test), on peut s’apercevoir que la connaissance a un impact significatif sur le comportement ecologique. The present paper argues for three reasons why knowledges influence on ecological behavior is underestimated systematically. First, it is not the mere amount of knowledge available that determines behavior. Different forms of knowledge must work together in a convergent manner if they are to foster ecological behavior. Second, knowledges effect remains undetected also, because some statistical procedures neither correct for measurement error attenuation nor uncover mediated influences accurately. Third, psychological factors such as knowledge apparently have a limited influence on ecological behavior when strong situational constraints are effective. When an ecological behavior measure makes—as a performance test—systematic use of situational influences though, knowledge can be revealed as affecting ecological behavior significantly.

Psychological Restoration in Nature as a Positive Motivation for Ecological Behavior

Shifting the focus from fear, guilt, and indignation related to deteriorating environmental quality, the authors hypothesized that people who see greater potential for restorative experiences in natural environments also do more to protect them by behaving ecologically, as with recycling or reduced driving. University students (N = 488) rated a familiar freshwater marsh in terms of being away, fascination, coherence, and compatibility, qualities of restorative person-environment transactions described in attention restoration theory. They also reported on their performance of various ecological behaviors. The authors tested a structural equation model with data from a randomly drawn subset of participants and then confirmed it with the data from a second subset. For the combined subsets, perceptions of the restorative qualities predicted 23% of the variance in general ecological behavior. As the only direct predictor, fascination mediated the influences of coherence, being away, and compatibility.

Ecological Behavior, Environmental Attitude, and Feelings of Responsibility for the Environment

Given their definition of subjective norms, rational-choice theories must be located within the realm of social conventionality. However, subjective norms can be grounded in moral as well as conventional considerations. Not surprisingly, then, rational-choice theories insufficiently explain behaviors that are at least partially moral, such as ecological behavior. The present paper establishes an expanded rational-choice model of environmental attitude that extends into the moral domain by using feelings of personal obligation toward the environment (i. e., feelings of responsibility) as an additional predictor of intentions to behave ecologically. Findings from two studies are presented. In Study 1 a sample of Swiss adults (N = 436) was used to test the proposed model. Study 2 replicates the findings of Study 1 with a sample of California college students (N = 488). Assessments were carried out in a structural equation modeling framework. Environmental knowledge, environmental values, and responsibility f...

Reviving Campbell's Paradigm for Attitude Research

Because people often say one thing and do another, social psychologists have abandoned the idea of a simple or axiomatic connection between attitude and behavior. Nearly 50 years ago, however, Donald Campbell proposed that the root of the seeming inconsistency between attitude and behavior lies in disregard of behavioral costs. According to Campbell, attitude— behavior gaps are empirical chimeras. Verbal claims and other overt behaviors regarding an attitude object all arise from one “behavioral disposition.” In this article, the authors present the constituents of and evidence for a paradigm for attitude research that describes individual behavior as a function of a person’s attitude level and the costs of the specific behavior involved. In the authors’ version of Campbell’s paradigm, they propose a formal and thus axiomatic rather than causal relationship between an attitude and its corresponding performances. The authors draw implications of their proposal for mainstream attitude theory, empirical research, and applications concerning attitudes.

Two challenges to a moral extension of the theory of planned behavior: moral norms and just world beliefs in conservationism

The present paper employs a new approach to testing the sufficiency of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) in understanding intentions to behave ecologically. Based on two panel surveys, we explore whether the TPB should be extended into the moral domain by applying an aggregated, more reliable, and thus, more valid version of the TPB. The sample used consisted of 895 randomly selected German-speaking Swiss. A year later, 823 people returned a second questionnaire. Structural equation analyses reveal that attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control jointly account for 81% and 80% of peoples intention. This, in turn, predicts 51% and 48%, respectively, of peoples behavior variance. The explanatory power of the TPB is not improved by adding moral norms or by including two Just World Belief scales.

Ecological behavior and its environmental consequences: a life cycle assessment of a self-report measure

The environmental impact of individuals, namely, how much they pollute and what resources they consume, is of paramount importance. However, even environmental psychologists rarely study levels of pollution or resource and energy savings. The present paper aims to ecologically validate 52 behaviors of a well-established self-report measure of ecological conduct (i.e. the General Ecological Behavior scale; Kaiser, J. Appl. Social Phychol. 28 (1998) 395, using the items’ environmental consequences. Our objective is to contrast a behavior’s environmental consequences with the comparable effect of a reasonable alternative. By means of applying data from available Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) literature and databases, two LCA experts were able to compare each of 52 performance pairs’ overall environmental impact. None of the 30 presumably ecological behaviors of the scale turned out to be less environmentally effective than its alternative, and none of the 22 unecological behaviors turned out to be more environmentally effective than its alternative. The correspondence between a behavior’s environmental consequences and its scale-incorporated, presumed, impact falls between 79% and 100%, both being statistically significant. r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Psychological restoration in nature as a source of motivation for ecological behaviour

People may behave in environmentally friendly ways because they gain psychologically from their experiences in natural environments. Psychological benefits of nature experience may also underlie concerns about personally harmful effects of environmental problems. Cross-sectional survey data from 1413 Norwegian adults were used to assess the relationship between use of natural environments for psychological restoration and ecological behaviour, as mediated by personal environmental concern. Mediation tests with hierarchical regression analyses provided evidence of partial mediation; the use of natural environments for restoration remained a significant predictor of ecological behaviour after the entry of environmental concern into the analysis. These associations held independently of age, gender, education, household income, size of community of upbringing, size of community of current residence and distance of current residence from an outdoor recreation area. Among sociodemographic variables, only gender had a significant association with the use of natural environments for restoration, suggesting that their use transcends several important social categories in Norway. In short, positive experiences in natural environments may promote ecological behaviour.

Zur Angemessenheit selbstberichteten Verhaltens : eine Validitätsuntersuchung der Skala Allgemeninen Ökologischen Verhaltens (Accuracy of self-reports: Validating the general ecological behavior scale)

Zusammenfassung. Die Validitat subjektiver Verhaltensdaten wird immer wieder angezweifelt. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, die Ubereinstimmung zwischen selbstberichteten und beobachteten okologischen Verhaltensweisen zu prufen. Dazu wurden 40 Personen, die sich laut eigener Angaben besonders okologisch bzw. besonders wenig okologisch verhielten, von zwei Interviewerinnen zu Hause besucht. Bei dieser Gelegenheit wurden exemplarisch 14 von gesamthaft 65 Verhaltensweisen der Skala Allgemeinen Okologischen Verhaltens (siehe Kaiser, 1998) uberpruft, die bzw. deren Verhaltenskonsequenzen uns zuverlassig beobachtbar erschienen. Dies betraf z.B. den Besitz eines verbrauchsreduzierten Autos oder die Mitgliedschaft in einer Umweltschutzorganisation. Es zeigte sich, dass Selbstberichtsdaten nicht nur zeitlich stabile (rtt = .83; rtt = .96), sondern auch valide (κ = .78; M (r) = .81) Indikatoren okologischen Verhaltens darstellen; dies besonders dann, wenn selbstberichtete Verhaltensdaten in Form dichotomer Ereignisse - t...

Contextual conditions of ecological consumerism: A food-purchasing survey

This study seeks to develop an ecological consumption measure based on the Rasch model. At the same time, it also intends to detect contextual conditions that constrain specific food purchases recognized as environmentally significant behaviors. Moreover, it provides information about the environmental impact and consequences of the behaviors that constitute the proposed measure. Questionnaire data from 547 Swiss residents are used to test three classes of contextual conditions: consumer’s socioeconomic characteristics, consumer’s living circumstances, and store characteristics. With differential performance probabilities as the source of information to detect effective contextual influences on ecological behavior, the findings suggest that ecological consumption is rather susceptible to store and household characteristics but not to socioeconomic features. Furthermore, the conditions under consideration are not uniformly supporting or inhibiting. Instead, they appear to inhibit some behaviors while facilitating others.