In addition, awareness about the seriousness of climate change is growing. In another Eurobarometer survey, 88% of Europeans say that more serious measures are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) that are heating the planet. And 93% say they have made at least one behavior change To improve our relationship with the environment. The most common are to reduce waste, recycle and consume less use and pull products. But is this really a symptom of greater environmental awareness?
“Environmental awareness is the set of beliefs that make a person interested in knowing the environment and his problems, that feels concern and acts accordingly “explains José Antonio Corraliza, Professor of Social Psychology at the Autonomous University of Madrid. “But in psychology we have other closely related concepts and not always easy to distinguish, such as environmental sensitivity, which would be the concern about the environment as a result of the individual feeling empathy for him or a specific problem.”
How does environmental concern arise?
Human beings are aware of what happens around us. We see it, we feel it and we can also rationalize it. However, understand the processes that make a person end up having A pro -environmental attitude It is not simple, since many factors come into play. First, there is the availability of information about the environmental problems and their direct experience, since if we do not know they exist, we can hardly worry about them. But information itself is not enough to alter our beliefs and our values and change our attitude towards the environment.
“People do not usually change their behavior only for the information available. They do it because there are other people who value that they change their behavior, for imitation or simply because it is easy to change it,” adds Correar. “They are also important The situation and social norms. For example, if your recycling environment is easier than you recycles, but if you are in a dirty place full of garbage it is more likely to also throw the garbage anywhere. Finally, there is the cost of behavior change. The lower, that is, the easier to change, the more likely we will change. ”
In addition, the direct experience of problems is a much more decisive factor than the availability of information on abstract or distant problems. “We tend to think that a person who is concerned about the environment is concerned about the entire environment. However, most are sensitive to specific aspects that we perceive, such as pollution, or events with whom we feel special empathy, such as the extinction of a species, but we are very little sensitive to the processes that trigger those symptoms,” says the researcher.
