Environment and Behavior

It is being increasingly recognized that the success of efforts to preserve/restore biodiversity in urban areas is highly contingent on the preferences of human urban dwellers. We investigated preference ratings for photos of high- versus low-habitat-providing garden landscapes among residents (n = 487) in two specific areas of Perth, Western Australia, and their relationship with general environmental concern and attitudes toward native plants and urban biodiversity. We also investigated the impact of localized descriptive gardening norms. The findings indicate that the distinction between high-/low-habitat-providing gardens was important to respondents’ landscape preferences. The attitudinal variable with the strongest relationship to garden-type preference was residents’ attitudes toward native plants. Preferences were also highly related to prevailing gardening norms in respondents’ local area. We discuss our findings in relation to the structure and dynamics involved in human perceptions of and interactions with urban landscapes.

Three studies are reported that examine the effects of valence on connectedness with nature. In Study 1, results showed that the implicit association test (IAT) effect is robust to the valence of the stimuli. Participants showed stronger self-nature than self-built associations, regardless of whether the stimuli were positively or negatively valenced. Study 2 further tested that the positive IAT effect is due to the valence of the stimuli and showed an equally large IAT effect and a strong positive correlation between the positively and negatively valenced IAT stimuli. In Study 3, we address potential confounding effects of valence with a newly matched set of stimuli. Results were consistent with our prior findings in showing that valence of the stimuli did not affect the IAT scores. We conclude that while there are individual differences in connectedness with nature, such beliefs are not affected by positive or negative aspects of natural or built environments.

Research on urban walkability does not always make a clear distinction between design features supporting walkability and those leading to a sense of urban liveliness. Walkability, for this article’s purposes, entails the opportunity for continuous movement across some distance and therefore engages both the local and global street networks. Urban liveliness, by contrast, may exist in isolated pockets that provide limited support for physical activity. This case study of a large, urban smart growth development in Atlanta, Georgia, provides an example of a new development with characteristics that suggest a high degree of walkability. However, observational data show pedestrians are clumped on relatively few street segments rather than distributed throughout the site, indicating it is unlikely that the site is hosting much walking between the development and its surrounds. This descriptive case study is intended to contribute to more explicit theory of how environmental design contributes to walking.

Dunlap and colleagues’ New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale is widely used and, thus, merits testing to determine whether it should be treated as one scale, a set of independent scales, or a set of correlated subscales. The authors test for all three possibilities using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and find that a second-order factor structure with five interrelated dimensions provides a better fit for the data than a single factor structure or five independent factors structure. Results show that, as Dunlap originally assumed, the NEP is best represented as correlated scales involving five facets. The authors recommend that future research with the NEP use CFA within a structural equation modeling approach to accurately represent the five interrelated facets structure, and if CFA is unavailable, treating the scale as five correlated subscales is preferred over treating the NEP as a single score reflecting environmental concern.

To provide practitioners with useful information about how to promote proenvironmental behavior (PEB), a meta-analysis was performed on 87 published reports containing 253 experimental treatments that measured an observed, not self-reported, behavioral outcome. Most studies combined multiple treatments, and this confounding precluded definitive conclusions about which individual treatments are most effective. Treatments that included cognitive dissonance, goal setting, social modeling, and prompts provided the overall largest effect sizes (Hedge’s g > 0.60). Further analyses indicated that different treatments have been more effective for certain behaviors. Although average effect sizes are based on small numbers of studies, effective combinations of treatments and behaviors are making it easy to recycle, setting goals for conserving gasoline, and modeling home energy conservation. The results also reveal several gaps in the literature that should guide further research, including both treatments and PEB that have not been tested.