Pro-Social Behavior and the Environment

Social psychologists and environmental psychologists team up to try to understand how to get people to be more conscious of their environment.  It use to be that environmental psychologists focused on how the physical surroundings affected the people.  But now it is how we affect the environment.  Thus, applied social psychological theories are useful to understand the perceptions, feelings, and behaviour of people towards the environment and how to change the behavior to be more pro-social.  This is done by first understanding what causes the behavior and what policies can be designed to promote and target the prior behavior for change.  And, they want to see how effective the different interventions work.

There are many things that factor into being pro-social, pro-environmental.  But I will mention values and how they relate to environmental concerns.  First, there is NEP (no, this is not the Russians "New Economic Program" of the 1930's that confiscated all land & property also called NEP) it is the measurement of the fundamental beliefs and intentions that cause behavior called the new environmental paradigm (NEP).

Basically there are three value orientations.
1. Egoistic value orientation: which is that people try to get the best outcome for themselves like power, material wealth and ambition.
2.  Altruistic value orientation: which is concern for the welfare of other people by caring about equality, social justice and helpfulness.
3.  Biospheric or ecocentric value orientation: which reflects concern for non-human species and the earth and unity with nature.
Then policy makers use different theories of social controls to motivate people with rewards and/or punishments to encourage more pro-social/pro-environmental behavior.  They use many of the techniques that I have mentioned in previous blogs.  This is done through promoting pro-environmental behavior by first, interventions that target a person's perceptions, cognitions, motivations and norms.  And second, they will use interventions that aim at changing the consequence.