Suchergebnisse

This article examines the prevalence of politeness or civil behaviors in Paris and a smaller French provincial city (Nantes). Do people entering a large department store hold the door open for the person behind them? With a sample of 880 participants, observed at the entrance of department stores, no significant sex differences were found (for the participant or the person for whom the door could be held). Parisians were significantly less civil than their provincial counterparts, and high-density conditions reduced civil behavior in both settings. In the presence of a polite model (the preceding person holding the door open for the participant), Parisians, but not the provincial sample, are influenced by the preceding situation; the differences between Paris and the provincial city are in this case minimal. Results are considered in terms of social modeling: Being exposed to a polite behavior reactivates the cultural norm of politeness in Parisians.

An inadequate environment represents a stressful situation and is likely to produce aggressive behavior. Malfunctioning phones are stressful in more than one way: The users cannot place a call, do not know where other phone boxes are, and cannot get reimbursement of the money lost. The observed aggressive behavior of users could be explained by the lack of alternatives in this situation. To test this hypothesis, users were provided in a sample of phone boxes with additional information on possible next steps. The additional information reduces the amount of aggressiveness but does not change the nature of behavior. Results show that some aggressive acts against the environment develop when subjects feel they have no control in an inadequate environmental situation.

Today, people are highly mobile and identify themselves with various places. Mobility affects the decisions that a person makes about his or her final resting place and how his or her remains will be disposed. A semistructured, face-to-face interview is conducted with residents of Paris and Madrid. Data analyses consist of content analysis and correspondence analysis. The choice of corpse disposal method is related to one's religious affiliation and the spouse's decision for his or her own disposal method. The choice of final resting place is related to mobility, degree of attachment to the actual place of residence and to one's birthplace, and parents' decision for their final resting place. Younger and more mobile people prefer cremation as a burial procedure. Future research should consider how place identity and place appropriation contribute to one's choice of a final resting place.

Based on the results of three field research studies in Paris, this article outlines the way in which the individual constructs a cognitive and behavioral relationship with the environment at three different levels: housing, the residential neighborhood, and the city as a whole. Identity and environmental identification generating social cohesion and satisfaction is, according to the City-Identity-Sustainability model, an important condition for ecological behavior to occur. The appropriation or nonappropriation of a particular environmental context is analyzed in light of the differentiation of the relation to the dwelling, the immediate neighborhood, and the city and described in terms of modalities of interpersonal relationships, affective investment, satisfaction, and self-expression through residential history and place identity. The characteristics of modern urban life (mobility, transitional situations, and the denaturalization of the urban context) contribute to alter the individual's relations to dwelling as well as to the immediate and enlarged urban context.

It is thought that a dichotomy exists between two apparently contradictory belief systems: the so-called "Human Exception Paradigm" (HEP)—an anthropocentric belief system—and the "New Environmental Paradigm" (NEP), of ecocentric nature. The aim of this article was to test the presence of an integrative, nondichotomic, New Human Interdependence Paradigm (NHIP) and its influence on water conservation practices. The NHIP envisages interdependence between human progress and nature conservation and conceives it as a dynamic process of integration and incorporation of human needs into natural processes. Seven hundred and fifty-nine individuals living in cities of France, Italy, Mexico, and India responded to items of a purposively developed measuring instrument (the NHIP scale), as well to items of the HEP-NEP scale. They also self-reported the frequency of water conservation actions at their households. The NHIP coherently emerged from its observed indicators and it was a slightly better predictor of water conservation than the HEP-NEP scale.