Information Processing and Environmental Behavior

The world faces increasingly complex environmental and sustainability issues. Human behavior can both contribute to the problem, and the solution. In order for people to take steps to alter their behavior, decreasing their negative impact on the environment, they must be aware of the problems and their role in potential solutions. Information can play an important role in individual’s environmental behavior and in improving environmental policy. Three studies are undertaken to examine the factors that may influence people's assessment of sustainable science information. The first considers whether perception of the scientists providing information may impact one’s assessment of sustainability science information, in particular scientists' environmental worldviews. The second study focuses on better understanding a popular metric for measuring environmental worldviews, the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP). Finally, the third study investigates whether motivation for environmental actions come from external, or internal (personal) sources - do people vote in favor of renewable energy because they want to do the right thing, or because they think others want them to? This study also considers whether people with high (low) levels of external motivation may respond to environmental messages differently than people with high (low) levels of internal motivation. These studies find that citizens will react to environmental information differently; it is thus increasingly important to provide information that is perceived as salient, legitimate, credible and actionable.