Suchergebnisse

Explicit measures of environmental views can be affected by social desirability and cognitive biases. Implicit measures, which should avoid such issues, have previously faced difficulty in establishing balanced and representative stimuli. Recently, measuring environmental views has shifted toward using environmental values, rather than attitudes. Accordingly, this article outlines a novel approach to implicit measures of environmental views using the Implicit Association Task (IAT). Stimuli representing Egoistic and Biospheric value orientations were selected, having positive valence and categorical representation. Across three independent samples (total N = 293), this Environment IAT (a) showed expected positive correlations with explicit measures of environmental values and attitudes, (b) reflected significant differences between environmentalists and non-environmentalists, and (c) was a unique predictor of environmentalist status even after controlling for explicit values and attitudes. Implications of the Environment IAT suggest a new research approach to environmental preferences for predicting behavior, and the automatic formation of attitudes.

Workers at a pro-environmental charity in the United Kingdom were evaluated 19 months before the organization moved its headquarters to another town, and then evaluated again 1 and 4 weeks after the move. Travel habit (behavioral automaticity) weakened immediately after the move, and this was equal for those who changed travel mode during the relocation and those who did not. In those who changed mode, habit strength for the old mode did not disappear abruptly but rather decayed over the post-move period, whereas habit strength for the new mode grew concurrently. This demonstrates that even when overt behavior changes during a transition event, the underlying behavioral automaticity does not disappear immediately. Rather, there is a period during which habit for the new behavior becomes established and habit for the old behavior decays. Practical implications of these findings are discussed.