Pride and guilt as place-based affective antecedents to pro-environmental behavior

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Nathan J. Shipley¹  Carena J. van Riper¹  William Stewart²  Maria Chu³  Richard C. Stedman⁴  Florin Dolcos⁵ 

[1] Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;Department of Recreation, Sport and Tourism, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;Agricultural and Biological Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, Cornell University;Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology

关键词: place attachment;    place meanings;    emotion;    Pro-enviornmental behavior;    Environment - Agriculture;    Structural equation model - SEM;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1084741

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The interrelated concepts of place attachment and place meaning are antecedents to pro-environmental behavior and essential for supporting decisions that foster relationships between people and places. Previous research has argued that affect is instrumental in conceptualizing place-related phenomena but has not yet been considered in terms of discrete emotions. We disentangled the empirical relationships between concepts of place and the emotions of pride and guilt to understand how they collectively contributed to individuals’ decisions about environmental sustainability. Specifically, we conducted an online survey of residents living the Midwestern US and asked questions about residents’ attachments to places and their place-related behavior. We then tested a latent variable path model with first- and second-order factors that shaped the behavioral intentions of survey respondents, as well as evaluated the psychometric properties of a place meaning scale, to uncover the range of reasons why human-nature relationships were formed. Our findings show that multiple place meanings predicted place attachment, which in turn predicted the discrete emotions of pride and guilt. Place attachment, pride, and guilt positively correlated with pro-environmental behavior. We also observed that the relationship between multi-dimensional conceptualizations of place attachment and behavioral intentions was partially mediated by pride but not guilt, as hypothesized in response to the broaden and build theory of positive emotions. This study develops theoretical insights to clarify how cognitive-emotional bonding can lead people to behave in more environmentally friendly ways.

【 授权许可】

CC BY