Did You Just See That? Making Sense of Environmentally Relevant Behavior

We explored how social perceivers detect and explain others’ environmentally relevant behaviors (ERBs). Participants watched short videos in which an actor performed an ERB (e.g., composting) or a control behavior (e.g., setting the table); they were then asked to explain why the actor had performed this behavior. Participants ‘‘detected’’ an (a priori classified) ERB if their explanation made explicit reference to the environmental relevance of the action. In a comparison of self-identified environmentalists and nonenvironmentalists, environmentalists detected significantly more ERBs (d =1.3). Relying on a recently developed theory of behavior explanations, we also classified explanations into two modes: Explainers can offer reasons and thereby ‘‘mentalize’’—citing the subjective mental states (e.g., beliefs, desires) in light of which the agent chose to act; explainers can also offer causal history factors, referring to the broader background of that choice (e.g., personality, culture). When perceivers identified a behavior as environmentally relevant, they used significantly more causal history explanations, overlooking the agent’s subjective grounds for acting. This effect was stronger for self-identified environmentalists. One interpretation of these results is that actions framed as environmental are seen less as reflecting conscious choices and more as belonging to a broad category of behavior. Focusing on causal background rather than on the agent’s reasons may present obstacles for social perceivers’ adoption of other people’s environmental behavior. A s social perceivers, humans are deeply interested in the behavior of others. They spend considerable time and energy trying to figure out why other people do what they do and whether they should follow their lead (e.g., Ross & Nisbett, 1991). Indeed, this process of attempting to make sense of others’ behavior, traditionally termed attribution (e.g., Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967) or more broadly social cognition (Fiske & Taylor, 1991), is so basic and core to the human species that philosophers and scientists have spent decades examining why and how people do it with such apparent ease (Heider, 1958; Malle, 2004). In that time, researchers have discovered and described many features of people’s behavior attributions. For example, people use a sophisticated conceptual framework to explain others’ behavior (e.g., Malle, 1999), explanations rely on inferences about the agent’s mind (Malle, 2004; McClure, 2002; Read & Miller, 2005; Reeder, 2009), and people often use explanations to influence others (e.g., to improve one’s reputation; see Edwards & Potter, 1993; Malle et al., 2000). Unfortunately, psychological research on environmentally relevant behavior (ERB) has not yet tapped into the vast literature on attribution and social cognition, despite historically close connections between social psychology and fields investigating ERBs (e.g., conservation psychology, environmental sociology). Within the psychological literature on ERB, references to attribution often refer either to vague connections between ERB performance and phenomena such as the ‘‘fundamental attribution error’’ (e.g., Winter & Koger, 2004) or else to attributions of responsibility regarding environmental protection (Bamberg & Moser, 2007). Environmental research has not examined in detail the fundamental fact that people observe and wonder about others’ behavior, nor has it explored whether this wondering, and the subsequent explanations it leads to, We use the term environmentally relevant behavior to refer to any behavior that can be identified as having a significant direct or indirect impact, negative or positive, on the health and stability of natural (eco)systems. DOI: 10.1089/eco.2011.0044 a MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. VOL. 4 NO. 1 MARCH 2012 ECOPSYCHOLOGY 37 has significant impact on perceivers’ own environmental behaviors (but see Corral-Verdugo et al., 2002, for one partial exception). By contrast, the impact of the perceptions of other people’s behavior on the perceiver’s own actions has featured prominently in recent research in cognitive science, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. In the simplest case, observing another person folding a sheet of paper activates the perceiver’s corresponding motor program of folding a sheet of paper, making the perceiver’s equivalent action easier and more likely to occur (Decety, 2002). Directly relevant to our topic, research on goal contagion has demonstrated that social perceivers quite readily act on the goals of others (e.g., Dik & Aarts, 2007). Already, 18-month-old children recognize and copy another person’s goal even if that person has not completed the intended action (Meltzoff, 1995). Thus, other people’s actions provide a rather direct input to perceivers’ own actions. The extant research on the perception-action link has focused on relatively simple object-directed actions that do not require substantial interpretation. In most real-life circumstances, however, people interpret the meaning of another’s behavior rather than merely observing the surface motor pattern (Baird & Baldwin, 2001). Likewise, perceiving and potentially adopting (or actively avoiding) other people’s environmental actions is likely to involve the analysis of the action’s meaning, which requires both the recognition of the behavior as intended to be environmental and the interpretation of the actor’s relevant thoughts and goals in performing the behavior (Malle, 2004). Thus, our primary aim in the present research was to add a social cognitive perspective to the extant literature on ERB. As an initial step, we address two central processes: the detection of other people’s behaviors as environmental and the interpretation or explanation of those environmental behaviors. Detection of ERBs refers to the ability and propensity of social perceivers to identify other people’s actions as environmentally relevant. This process is important for at least two reasons. First, if behaviors are not detected as environmentally relevant, perceivers cannot analyze them for their worth and either support or oppose them as a function of their environmental significance. Second, if behaviors are not detected as environmentally relevant, perceivers cannot consider duplicating them as environmental actions—that is, they cannot adopt them as actions with environmental meaning (at best, they can blindly copy them, e.g., in an act of following norms). Our study represents a first exploration into the detection of ERB. The second process, explanation of ERBs, refers to perceivers’ (private or public) answer to the question of why an individual performed an environmental behavior. Explanation is significant because it provides the interpretation, the specific meaning of an observed behavior, which is usually given by the reasons for which the person performed the behavior (Malle, 2004). If social perceivers can grasp those reasons (and agree with them), their adoption of the environmental behavior may become more likely, because the cognitive accessibility of reasons for acting facilitates future behavior (Doll & Ajzen, 1992; McLachlan & Hagger, 2011). By contrast, if perceivers lack cognitive access to relevant reasons for performing the given ERB, their conscious adoption of the behavior remains unlikely. Thus, detection and explanation of ERBs are likely critical pathways for the social transmission of environmental behavior.