Environmental Consciousness in Daily Activities Measured by Negative Prompts

Sustainability

Ai Hiramatsu¹  Kiyo Kurisu²  Keisuke Hanaki²  Marc A. Rosen²  Yasuhiro Fukushima²  Yasushi Kondo²  Shinsuke Murakami²  Masaharu Motoshita² 

[1]Department of Urban Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

关键词: pro-environmental behavior (PEB);    psychological factor;    yes-bias tendency;    attitude-behavior gap;    questionnaire survey;    factor analysis;    cluster analysis;    text analysis;   

DOI  :  10.3390/su8010024

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The gap between people’s attitude and action as regards environmental issues has been pointed out even while surveys registered an increase in people’s environmental awareness. Among the possible reasons is that people tend to automatically answer “yes”, as most surveys on environmental consciousness use positively-phrased questions or prompts. To remove the “yes-bias” in previous surveys, this present study conducted in Japan a large-scale questionnaire survey on environmental consciousness using negative prompts and free-answered prompts on which behaviors people feel good/bad/uncertain for the environment. This study also investigated peoples’ psychological factors and concrete pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs) in daily life. The results of the questionnaire with negative prompts showed that the rate of people’s consciousness to the environment was lower compared with other surveys. Through factor analysis, five psychological factors were extracted as the explanatory factors of environmental attitude. Demographic effects on the consciousness and PEBs were also observed. Comparison of free-answers on concrete daily behaviors among five different environmentally conscious groups showed there were certain phases in the perception of PEBs based on consciousness level. Similar common behaviors were highly ranked as both PEB and doubtful behaviors, indicating that people were worried about actions that involve a trade-off relationship from diversified standpoints.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.