Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (6 page)

There seemed to be something of a clear consensus here, but what would my new research uncover? I used two measures – a computerised Likert scale and a ‘feeling thermometer’, which in this case would assess explicit feelings of warmth or coldness towards products with a high or low carbon footprint. The Likert scale gives a very simple measure of underlying attitude. A typical Likert scale is shown in
Figure 3.1
, and this is the computerised version we used in our actual research.

The feeling thermometer asked people to rate how warm or cold they felt towards high-carbon-footprint and low-carbon-footprint products and then the experimenter

 

Figure 3.1
A computerised version of the Likert scale for measuring attitudes to carbon footprint.

computed the difference between these two numbers. For example, someone with a very positive attitude to low-carbon-footprint products might tick ‘5’ meaning ‘very warm’ to the low-carbon-footprint products and ‘1’ meaning ‘very cold’ to the high-carbon-footprint products, and this would yield a thermometer difference score of ‘+4’. On the other hand, someone who had a very positive attitude towards high-carbon-footprint products might tick ‘5’ meaning ‘very warm’ on the high-carbon-footprint product and ‘1’ on the low-carbon-footprint product, thus producing a thermometer difference score of ‘-4’ (see
Figure 3.2
).

We found our first sample of participants for this research (Laura Sale was now officially my research assistant); we wanted to find a range of people of different ages and of different social backgrounds (not just the usual university students, but as usual somehow convenient for the environment of the university or college). Each participant was run individually and we had to do it this way to make sure that they knew what a carbon footprint actually was. In one

 

Figure 3.2
A computerised version of the feeling thermometer scale for measuring attitude towards high- and low-carbon-footprint products.

subsample of college kids, aged sixteen and upwards, we had to explain each time what a carbon footprint was before they could fill in the scale. Each time we administered the computerised test we had to check that they actually knew what they were rating. One seventeen-year-old lad interpreted the symbol quite literally (even after our introduction) and thought that it was the dent you made on the earth’s crust as you went about your everyday business. I never actually met this person and I thought that he had perhaps just a very visual way of understanding the nature of the world and how it works. Others were less kind.

The results looked very promising. The Likert scale revealed that 30% of our participants demonstrated a preference for products with a low carbon footprint and 40% of participants demonstrated a moderate preference for products with a low carbon footprint; 26% of participants demonstrated no preference and only 4% demonstrated a preference for products with a high carbon footprint (see
Figure 3.3
).

 

Figure 3.3
Explicit attitudes to carbon footprint as revealed by the Likert scale.

The feeling thermometer produced very similar results – 23% of participants showed a very strong preference for products with a low carbon footprint and an additional 40% showed some preference for low carbon products; 26% of participants were neutral in their attitudes (exactly the same figure as revealed by the Likert scale) and 7% of participants showed a preference for products with a high carbon footprint (see
Figure 3.4
).

These are clearly positive results, but just how positive depends on how you look at them. One way of looking at them (the way of the optimist) is to conclude that somewhere in the region of 67% to 70% of participants already show some significant preference for low-carbon-footprint products. The other way of looking at the data is that only 23% to 30% of people showed a strong preference for low-carbon-footprint products and that in reality we need to work on 70% of the population that are not sufficiently

 

Figure 3.4
Explicit attitudes to carbon footprint as revealed by the feeling thermometer.

concerned about this issue. But these results would suggest that underlying attitudes are very good.

However, there is a slight fly in the ointment that should be obvious to everyone. What happens if the expression of these attitudes is affected by the fact that everybody in our society knows that green is good? Even the lad who thought that the carbon footprint of a product reflected indentations on the earth’s crust still knew to say that low is good. How do we know that all of these easily expressed and deeply felt underlying attitudes are something more than the desire to look good in a research encounter?

We checked to see how people thought about those who cared for the environment and, not surprisingly, they thought in very positive terms about them. We found a new
group of respondents and we asked them to describe the attributes of someone (1) who is environmentally friendly, (2) who is sensitive to carbon footprint and (3) who recycles, and we asked them to rate their judgement on a series of scales (from +3 to -3) – ‘considerate and inconsiderate’, ‘thoughtful and thoughtless’, ‘caring and uncaring’, ‘knowledgeable and ignorant’, ‘selfless and selfish’, and ‘nice and nasty’. The results are shown in Tables
3.2
,
3.3
and
3.4
and show a clear social desirability effect.

Who wouldn’t want to be seen as ‘considerate’ and ‘thoughtful’ and ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘nice’? In other words, people who are environmentally friendly are viewed in a positive light and the problem with this, of course, is that this social desirability, which is obviously very widespread

Table 3.2
Social judgements about people who are environmentally friendly

Table 3.3
Social judgements about people who are sensitive to a carbon footprint

Table 3.4
Social judgements about people who recycle.

throughout society, could potentially affect the expression of explicit attitudes towards environmental behaviour. In situations like this, it is clearly too risky to rest all conclusions on what people tell us either in interviews or even in the relevant anonymity of a computerised scale. People know that they are being judged: when you need to do research on a one-to-one basis there is always some kind of social bond between the researcher and the researched, and most human beings want to come across well. For these reasons and more I began to worry about how we get at underlying attitudes in situations like this. And then, of course, there was a more basic worry at the back of my mind – perhaps, after all, people do not know what their underlying attitude really is; perhaps Allport was wrong in the way that he developed the concept of attitude. Perhaps it does have its real roots in the unconscious. Perhaps he was right the first time when he wrote that ‘often an attitude seemed to have no representation in consciousness other than a vague sense of need, or some indefinite or un-analyzable feeling of doubt, assent, conviction, effort, or familiarity’ (Allport 1935:800). Perhaps this was what we had to try to measure. It turned out that I was not alone in my doubt; someone had got there long before me.