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Is there a gap between environmental attitudes and behaviours? If so why and what can be done about it?

Attitudes are global evaluations toward some object or issue and they are formed through the ideologies and beliefs of family members, peers and media exposure while behaviours are influenced by the actual, perceived, imagined or implied presence of others. Allport’s concept of the individual’s behaviours is seen as the interaction between the feelings, behaviours and thoughts of the individual in conjunction with this trilogy being a joint function of personal and situational influences. This assertion is central to the debate of whether a person’s behaviour is influenced by attitudes or situations or if it is a consequence of them both and with what portions. One of the areas where there has been a substantial amount of interest recently is that of the environment particularly of climate change and global warming. Environmental behaviours encompass a wide spectrum of activities and focal points which can leave an individual in a situation where the focus is too narrow and their own activities can be forgotten and therefore conflict occurring between the attitudes and behaviours. An example of this would be if a person volunteers their time and money to an organisation that targets areas of forests that are considered for plantation yet they do not recycle materials at home, they drive a car that uses large quantities of petrol or within their house they have numerous products made from endangered trees.

So to put it frankly although there is probably a small minority of people who do have parallels between their attitudes and behaviours the majority of people do not have consistency between their attitudes and behaviours.

There may also be an issue due to attitude accessibility referring to how easily the attitude come to mind, therefore highly accessible attitudes are more influential. General attitudes can help cause behaviour but only if they are prominent in the person’s conscious mind. The A-B problem identifies the problem of inconsistencies between attitudes and behaviours.
There are a plethora of reasons why the behaviours of an individual may differ from their attitudes with the most prominent being opportunities available, time restraints and the influence of the group and its dynamics.

So is the environment that big a deal and particular all this hype with global warming and climate change. Global warming is the observed average temperature increase in the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans and this is sufficient enough to cause climate change. It is a significant issue with a rise of the average global temperature from 13.5°C in 1860 to 14.4°C in 2000. This increase in temperature will result in the rising se levels, increase in frequency of extreme weather, escalating diseases and in the changing of the ecosystem subsequently resulting in the extinction of many species. So although there have reports about this is not a real concern this is not the case with such films as the Great Global Warming Swindle this is not the case.

Group dynamics can also have either a positive or negative influence, with either feeling pressure to conform or in a wider situation feeling that the issue is out of their control with everyone else responding and therefore that individual does not need to, such as the emergency situations experiments where they look to others to determine the situation such as the fire alarm experiment or that someone else will help, for example the women who was stabbed and everyone saw but presumed that someone else would take care of the situation.
Group pressure can help in a positive way by the need to conform to actual or perceived ideals of the group, so that if you drop a piece of paper and you get a negative reinforcement from the group you are more likely to pick up the paper or at least next time change your behaviour. However, if this is just the groups beliefs and not your own then this will not be a strong belief and therefore it is less likely to remain behaviour for the environment when the group is not around.

This is partly true to with the media’s influence in some cases with at the moment it appears that there is a great proportion of people concerned with the environment due to the celebrities worry and that it is just a fad. This making of the environmental issues trendy is an interesting one for two reasons, firstly is the line between where the environmental issue is becoming materialistic and secondly often the celebrities have major discrepancies between about what they preach and their actual behaviour.

Once a belief is formed then it is hard to change due in part to the fact that information that doesn’t support the belief will be questioned more and justified in terms of the current belief rather than analysing what is actual happening. For example the media portrays “hippies” and environmental “ferals” in a certain way, often unclean with dreadlocks and although mostly calm when something really upsets them, like with APEC or logging in Tasmania then they will protest and kick up a fuss. Therefore if you met a older good looking person, who you knows has a good reliable job and they tell you that they are a strong supporter for the environment you may find this hard to believe due to the pre-exposed conditions and your previous experiences.

Time is a huge factor when discussing people’s environmental attitudes and in addition to this the resources that are available and the accessibility of these resources is crucial when examining the cognitive dissonance between a person’s belief and their behaviour. For example a person may want to help with the environment but there may be no recycling areas for ages or they may need to use transport that is not the most ecologically sound. The government is making this easier to obtain with the change of housing regulation to meet standards and regulations and such projects as able to buy green energy and buy hybrid cars.

The way in which the environmental message is presented is important and effects our response rate, with human’s being more responsive to people they like, are handsome, who have their information from a credible source and appear in a non-threatening manner but offer just a little shock value. In addition to this people who are reinforced positively with actions that help the environment and negatively to those that disadvantage it are more likely keep responding in a positive manner, even if it just through smaller reinforcements such as praise.
Knowledge is a powerful tool so it is crucial that all of our generation but particularly the younger children are being taught about the environment so in years to come they can help maintains it for a world that can exist.

Therefore there is high cognitive dissonance when concerned with environmental behaviour and these are mainly due to time, resources available and relatively poor ideas and beliefs. Therefore increasing resources available should help people cut down there time and therefore make them more likely to conform to environmental benefiting behaviour while having the message spoken from a credible source and through people we like would also help improve environmental efforts. It is important that we are not negatively swayed by the media and that we recognise group effects, and that they can be both positive and negative and finally that we do have more of an open mind, try and ban stereotypes and try to improve behaviour for everyone.