Summary Environmental psychology: an introduction - Steg, de Groot 2/E
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Course
Environmental psychology (PSMSB2)
Institution
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RuG)
Book
Environmental Psychology
Summary of the whole book 'Environmental psychology: an introduction' edited by Linda Steg & Judith I. M. de Groot second edition.
ISBN 1089
The book is used for the master course 'Environmental psychology'
Ch1 Environmental psychology: history, scope, and methods
1.1 Introduction
Environmental psychology = studies the interplay between individual & the built & natural
environment.
1.2 History of the field
Most studies focused on how different environment influences people’s perceptions & behavior
architectural psy.
Much attention was given to built physical environment and how it affected human behavior & well-
being in the early period of environmental psy.
During the late 1960s, rapid growth in environmental psy started. Especially in relation to
environmental problems. Studies on sustainability issues. First mainly focused on air pollution, urban
noise, and appraisal of environmental quality. Later also energy supply & demand.
1.3 Current scope and characteristics of the field
In the beginning of the 21st century, it became apparent that climate change, pollution, and
deforestation are challenges threatening health, economic prospects, and food & water supply.
Human behavior is one of the main causes of environmental problems. Environmental psy can be
seen as being developed into psy of sustainability.
4 key features in psy that charac the field:
1. Interactive approach: interaction between humans & built & natural environment. What
factors affect what?
2. Interdisciplinary collaboration: architecture, geography, social psy, cogn psy, environmental
scientists.
3. Problem-focused approach: try to contribute towards solving problems instead of curiosity.
4. Diversity of methods: quantitative, qualitative, internal & external validity.
1.4 Main research methods in environmental psychology
Questionnaire studies to describe behavior & gather perceptions, opinions, attitudes & beliefs.
Causality cannot be established, which weakens internal validity. It cannot be excluded that a
confound has caused the relsh. The direction is not clear. Manipulation of environmental conditions
is often unethical or impossible. External validity tends to be high however. Easy & low costs.
Laboratory experiments: can draw causal relsh between variables. Low external validity.
Computer simulation studies: aim to learn about complex systems that involve thousands of people
or studies on how people evaluate future environmental scenarios. Make it possible to keep some
control over the environment, thus increasing internal validity, while external validity is not
compromised too much.
Field studies: high external validity, w/out compromising too much on internal validity. Experimenter
tries to control by manipulating IV & by trying to randomly assign pp to different study conditions.
But in many situations, random assignment is not possible & an experiment is difficult to set up in
real settings.
Case studies: in depth studies about particular situations. Exploratory, qualitative examination.
,Ch2 Environmental risk perception
2.1 Introduction
Risk perceptions can prompt or oppose actions to address particular risks.
2.2 What are environmental risks?
Environmental risks are characterized by high complexity & uncertainty. Both risks for & risks from
the environment. Environmental risks often emerge from the aggregated behavior of many
individuals rather than from a single activity. Consequences of environmental risks are often
temporally delayed & geographical distant.
2.3 Subjective risk judgements
Risk perception = people’s subjective judgement about the risk that is ass w/ some situation, event,
activity, or technology.
Assess subjective risk judgements:
respondents are asked to give an overall judgement by either rating or rank ordering various
risks according to their overall riskiness or to the degree to which they experience concern,
worry, or threat concerning these risks.
Asking how much money people are willing to accept (WTA) to tolerate a particular risk.
Have respondents estimate the subjective of a given outcome.
People employ heuristics when making judgements. Tendency to overestimate small frequencies &
to underestimate larger ones when judging the frequency of various dangers.
Availability heuristic: people are more likely to overestimate the occurrence of an event the
easier it is for them to bring to mind examples of a similar event.
Anchoring-and-adjustment heuristic: when making estimates, people often start out from a
reference point that is salient in the situation (the anchor) & then adjust this first estimate to
arrive at a final judgement. The adjustment is insufficient and the final estimate is biased
towards the anchor.
Unrealistic optimism: tendency to believe that they are more likely to experience positive
events & less likely to experience negative events than others.
Framing effects: different descriptions of otherwise identical problems can alter people’s
decisions. Changes in working can change perspectives. Loss aversion is one explanation for
this.
Affect heuristic: affective states serve as important info inputs for risk judgements. If
individual feel positive about an activity, they tend to judge the risk as low the benefit as
high. When feeling negative, tend to judge the risk as high & benefit as low.
Temporal discounting = outcomes in the far future are subjectively less significant than immediate
outcomes.
Environmental risks should be perceived as less severe when the consequences are delayed. But little
evidence is found for this. It could be that environmental risks tap into moral values.
Psychometric paradigm = identifying cognitive maps of diverse risk events, activities, or technologies
& its underlying psy dimensions that lead individual to perceive something as more or less risky.
Dread risk: describe the extent to which a risk is experienced as dreadful or as having severe,
catastrophic consequences.
Unknown risks: extent to which the risk is experienced as new, unfamiliar, unobservable, or having
delayed effects.
, 2.4 Risk, values, and morality
Risk perception may be driven by values & moral positions. People low on traditional values & high
on altruism tend to perceive greater global environmental risks.
Protected or sacred values: people think of entities or values as absolute, not to be traded off for
anything else, particularly not for economic values.
Consequentialist principles entail conclusions about what is morally right or wrong based on the
magnitude & likelihood of outcomes. Maximize benefits & minimize harms. Deontological principles
focus on inherent rightness or wrongness of the act. Morally mandated actions or prohibitions.
2.5 Emotional reactions to environmental risks
Emotions infl risk perceptions. Judge risk higher when feel negative about activity, but risk lower
when feeling positive about it. different specific emotions can have differential impacts on perceived
risks. Fear is ass w/ evaluating situations as uncertain & uncontrollable, leading individual to perceive
events as riskier. Ethics-based self-directed emotions are strong for individual behavior such as car
use. Experienced when responsibility can be ascribed more clearly to one agent.
Ch3 Climate change as a unique environmental problem
3.1 Introduction
Anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is alarming. Impacts incl destabilization of ecological
& human systems & the rate of change outpacing humans & other species’ ability to adapt, creating
displacement, disease, death & extinction.
Climate change has varied local impacts. The complex, diffuse, distal, ethical & political nature of
climate change contributes to:
Difficulties the public has in understanding climate change;
Their assessment of whether climate change is a risk & whether & how the public responds
to the problem.
3.2 Public understanding of climate change
Awareness & understanding of climate change has increased since the 80s. Climate change was in
the concepts of weather, air pollution & ozone depletion.
Little awareness yet for ocean acidification, because the general public doesn’t understand the
carbon cycle. Human contribution to changes in the carbon cycle are causing climate change & ocean
acidification. Lack of awareness or motivated reasoning can lay behind the fact that people have a
tendency to identify others’ energy use rather than their own.
Gaps in knowledge can reflect lack of willingness to accept climate science. The diversity in public
understanding can be attributed to how & from whom we learn, thus the sources and the evaluation
of these sources.
3.3 Assessing the risk of climate change
The extent to which understand climate change is reflected in the perceptions of the risk it entails. To
some, climate change is an impending risk. To others, climate change is a distal risk of lesser
importance than other, more well-defined threats to humanity or to immediate personal life events.
To still others, anthropogenic climate change is a hoax.
Objective & motivated reasoning can infl assessments of the probability of harm & how serious the
problem is.
Individuals must:
Detect a problem. The availability heuristic can make the climate change less salient than
other risks & motivated reasoning can accentuate this problem.
Interpret the problem as an emergency or threat. Attributional ambiguity about the causes &
impact of climate change incr uncertainty & potential doubt about the impacts of climate
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