The Environmental Worldviews and Climate Change Mitigation Behaviors: Testing the New Ecological Scale in the Smallest Space Analysis for Chinese Samples

Xue, Wen; Zhao, Shengchuan

doi:10.7763/ijesd.2015.v6.654

Cited by 11 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…While fatalistic culture has a significantly negative correlation with environmental risk perception, the other three cultures are positively correlated with environmental risk perception. In addition, the results in Model 2 suggest a significant positive correlation between risk perception and pro-environmental behavior, which is consistent with existing studies [8]. It supports Hypothesis 3b that the increase in environmental risk perception will increase individuals' pro-environmental behavior.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 88%

“…First, existing research justified the value of selecting worldview survey items in existing research to measure cultures [29,[53][54][55]. Second, research on Asian countries have found limitations and challenges by using measures developed for research in the United States [8,56].…”

Section: Methods and Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Fatalism is a culture that favors unpredictable actions. Because fatalists are unlikely to maintain a stable position in life, it has been proven that they have little to do with environmental problems [8,43,44]. Consequently, fatalism is often excluded from many studies that predict environmental protection behaviors.…”

Section: Cultural Worldviews and Pro-environmental Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to the finding that risk perception can directly influence pro-environmental behaviors, previous studies have also shown that the influence of cultural worldviews on pro-environmental behavior can be mediated by environmental risk perception [8,11]. According to culture theory, specific behaviors result from specific attitudes that are constrained by culture [8,11]. Therefore, each of the four types of cultures will influence the levels of environmental risk perception, which will further influence the behavioral choices.…”

Section: Cultural Worldviews Environmental Risk Perception and Pro-mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Environmental risk perception stimulates people's sense of urgency and responsibility to protect the environment and encourages more environmental protection behaviors [1,2,8]. However, other scholars have found that there is a discrepancy between environmental risk perception and environmental protection behaviors [9,10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Environmental Risk Perception, Risk Culture, and Pro-Environmental Behavior

Zeng

Jiang

Yuan

2020

IJERPH

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Mixed evidence exists regarding the relationship between environmental risk perception and pro-environmental behavior. This study uses an existing online survey conducted by the Center of Ecological Civilization (CEC) of China University of Geosciences from December 2015 to March 2016 and examines how cultural bias influences environmental risk perception and behavior. We found that an individual's pro-environmental behavior is not only influenced by environmental risk perception, but also by his or her cultural worldviews. Built on culture theory (CT), our empirical results suggest that young Chinese people are more located in "high-group" culture, where egalitarian culture and hierarchical culture dominate. The higher scores of hierarchical and egalitarian cultures of Chinese youth, the more likely they are to protect the environment. Moreover, the relationship between cultural worldviews and pro-environmental behaviors are mediated by perceived environmental risks. culture influences pro-environmental behavior directly. This study also tries to test the generalizability of CT by applying CT to non-Western countries.This paper uses an existing online survey conducted by the Center for Ecological Civilization of China University of Geosciences (CEC) from December 2015 to March 2016. Our sample includes 8084 students from 152 universities in 30 provinces across China, who were surveyed on the Internet. This research makes contributions in four aspects. First, this large-scale data allows us to map the distribution of environmental risk perception and pro-environmental behavior among young people in China. Second, this paper is the first research testing the influence of individuals' cultural worldviews on pro-environmental behavior in China. More specifically, we test the effects of culture worldviews, environmental risk perception and other control variables, including knowledge and demographics, on pro-environmental behavior. Third, this paper analyzes how the relationship between risk culture and pro-environmental behavior is mediated by an individual's cultural bias. Fourth, Douglas (1982) used the "grid-group" framework to analyze how the relations between individuals and society determine people's perception of risk. CT was then introduced by Wildavsky to study politics in the United States and was applied to many western countries [23]. However, there is only a few pieces of research on China [21,22]. This study will contribute to improve CT's generalizability by applying CT to Chinese context and providing some implications for measuring culture based on existing research.The paper starts with a review of CT and its application in China. Based on the theory and existing research on the relationships among cultures, environmental risk perception, and pro-environmental behavior, we suggest three sets of research hypotheses in Section 2. Section 3 introduces data, variables, and methods used to test our hypotheses. Section 4 describes the result of our data testing and examines its robustness. Section 5 is t...

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 88%