Don't bug me!: The role of names, functions, and feelings in shaping children's and adults' conservation attitudes about unappealing species

Are Humans Part of the Natural World? U.S. Children's and Adults’ Concept of Nature and its Relationship to Environmental Concern

“…Taken together, these findings suggest that the most promising sustainability interventions with urban U.S. children are likely to be those that target children's basic awareness that humans are part of nature via an emphasis on ecological interconnectedness. Specifically, despite the challenges of teaching about the causal complexity of ecosystems to young children (Grotzer & Solis, 2015), children are deeply interested in—and biased to attend to—functional relationships (Kelemen, 2012), and when leveraged, this interest has been found to enhance insect conservation concern (Kelemen et al., 2023). Formal and informal learning programs that help young children understand humans’ shared history and reciprocal functional interconnectedness with other components of local or, potentially, global ecosystems (Cuzzolino, Grotzer, Tutwiler, & Torres, 2019; Grotzer & Solis, 2023; Kelemen et al., 2023; U.S.…”

“…Second, in addition to affecting general moral concern, it may also have the more specific effect of decreasing biocentric moral reasoning. Biocentric moral reasoning ascribes inherent value to all living and non‐living natural things and has been found to robustly predict not only environmentalist values but concrete sustainable behavior (e.g., reduced car use, reduced household water consumption; e.g., Ajibade & Boateng, 2021; DeGroot & Steg, 2007, 2009; Jakovcecic & Steg, 2013; Kelemen, Brown, & Pizza, 2023; Rottman, 2014; Washington, Taylor, Kopnina, Cryer, & Piccolo, 2017). Specific effects on biocentrism may occur because classifying humans as separate from nature may reflect assumptions that the human category is intrinsically distinct from all other natural categories and is thus in need of special treatment.…”

“…Our studies focus on U.S. urban‐dwelling children and adults because their immersion in predominantly artificial environments makes them an interesting test case for understanding the conditions under which human‐inclusive nature concepts can occur. Furthermore, prior research suggests that urban‐dwellers are particularly likely to voice non‐conservationist attitudes and engage in unsustainable behaviors so understanding predictors of environmental attitudes in this group is important (e.g., Chawla, 2020; Collado et al., 2016; Duron‐Ramos, Collado, García‐Vázquez, & Bello‐Echeverria, 2020; Kelemen et al., 2023). In the next sections, we further outline why we adopted particular methods and explored the factors that we did.…”

“…As noted earlier, prior research has found that people who express general environmental moral concern are more likely to act in pro‐environmental and sustainable ways (e.g., Liu, Teng, & Han, 2020; Markowitz, 2012). Furthermore, individuals who express biocentric reasons for their environmental moral concern are more likely to engage in conservationism and environmentalist actions (e.g., De Groot & Steg, 2007; Gagnon Thompson & Barton, 1994; Kelemen et al., 2023; Rottman, 2014; Stern, Kalof, Dietz, & Guagnano, 1995). By contrast, anthropocentric moral reasoning—which can sometimes incorporate explicit human exceptionalist ideas about intrinsic human superiority—has been linked to lower engagement with environmental issues and sustainable behavior (Ajibade & Boateng, 2021; Betz & Coley, 2022; Kim et al., 2023).…”

“…We therefore explored whether a human‐inclusive concept of nature is predictive of these outcomes in children and adults. These questions were particularly interesting in elementary‐aged children given suggestions that, even if children express general moral concern about the environment, it is not usually for spontaneous biocentric moral reasons until adolescence (e.g., Kahn & Lourenço, 2002; but see Kelemen et al., 2023; Pizza & Posada, 2020).…”