113
Connecting to Nature in the Lab
through “Earth Song”: The Malleability
of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes
towards Nature1
Tomáš Chabada, Tomáš Hampejs, Jan Skalík,
Eva Bujnošková, Jaroslav Hlinka
ABSTRACT The focus of our empirical study was to determine whether a short laboratory-based
intervention manipulating the self-nature relation through a new construct of environmental problem
salience is capable of causing a situational change in implicit and explicit attitudes towards nature. We
were interested in how the self would connect itself to the state of nature portrayed as a threatening problem
for which the self is possibly responsible. The participants were divided into two groups based on their
environmental profiles and exposed to a video clip which implied a global environmental problem. The
study treatment was designed to make the environmental problem salient. We have observed a clear effect
of the field of study, yet the sample size (N=77) was not sufficient for the treatment effect to be statistically
significant. Our study brings mainly preliminary result and further and more robust research is needed. We
observed a slight change in attitudes. The attitudes had divergent directions according to the environmental
profile of the recipient. The results suggest that the participants with a low environmental profile more
deeply perceived the problem as someone else’s problem and dissociated themselves from the nature
framed by the treatment, while the participants with a high environmental profile accepted the problem
and associated themselves with the nature framed by the treatment. Our findings are in agreement with the
critique of the apocalyptical discursive pattern, which considers planned change of environmental policy
with apocalyptical discursive pattern to be ineffective.
KEYWORDS Environmental attitudes, Connectedness to Nature Scale, New Ecological Paradigm
Scale, Implicit Association Test, implicit attitudes, context sensitivity
Introduction and Theory
Personal dispositions such as attitudes, values, beliefs, norms and worldviews are an important
area of study when considering the immediate non-situational causes of human behaviour.
Environmental attitudes, among other related constructs, have a prominent place in the
research of ecological psychology (Thompson and Barton 1994).
Sociální studia. Department of Sociology FSS MU, 3/2015. S. 113–133. ISSN 1214-813X.
1 The paper was written as part of the project “Ekologicky příznivé varianty životního způsobu 2”
[Environmentally-Friendly Lifestyle Alternatives 2] (MUNI/A/0769/2013) at the Faculty of Social
Studies, Masaryk University, Czech Republic.
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The environmental movement in the Czech Republic (Binka 2008; Novák 2014) and
elsewhere (O’Leary 1993; Foust and O’Shannon Murphy 2009) has held a continuous debate
whether a more radical and apocalyptic or a more pragmatic and solution-based discourse in
the communication of environmental problems is appropriate. In our study, we aim to discuss
a particular but important argument in the debate: what are the imminent effects of emotionally
presented information about an environmental threat on one’s attitudes towards nature
and its protection?
If generally an attitude refers to a person´s evaluative judgement about a particular entity
(Eagly and Chaiken 1993), the construct of environmental attitudes refers to the collection of
beliefs, effects and behavioural intentions a person holds regarding environmentally related
activities or issues (Schultz et al. 2004). Attitudes can be understood as part of the more general
space of values, which can be seen as an organizing system for attitudes or even their
determinant. If we understand values as “desirable goals that serve as guiding principles in
people’s lives” (Schwartz 1992: 21), we usually find a dividing horizon for nature as a value
in itself or as a means for getting to other values.
Worldview is the broadest and most integrative concept of personal dispositions used
in both environmental studies and elsewhere. Generally the term environmental worldview
refers to a person´s adhered belief about humanity´s relationship with nature. In this sense,
a person´s worldview serves as a cognitive paradigm or belief system. An important part
of the concept is its connection to a shared group identity, or, in the broadest sense, to culture
(Johnson, Hill, and Cohen 2011). Due to its large scope and possible redundancy, the
term has not received much theoretical attention in cognitive psychology (see Koltko-Rivera
2004), but, for example, a substantial amount of socio-psychological research using worldview
is centred around the Terror Management Theory (see Koltko-Rivera 2004: 20). Here
worldview is understood as a culturally infused defence mechanism for coping with the existential
fear of uncertainty. In a similar worldview-defence way, this concept is studied in the
psychology of religion (e.g. Van den Bos, van Ameijde and van Gorp 2006; Jong, Halberstadt
and Bluemke 2012).
Our study traverses the space between environmental attitudes and worldview along
the human-nature relationship. Here we want to follow the eco-psychological research of
connectedness to nature (see below), but in addition to the dimension of bio-psychological
human-environment relations, we also want to stress another cultural dimension of the
relationship. Our article proposes that studying a person’s connectedness with contextualized
nature could help us navigate the socio-cultural complexities of people’s understanding
of their relation to nature. This research perspective should be especially helpful for
environmental education and policy makers who want to create a change in environmental
concerns.
Implicit and Explicit Attitudes towards Nature
According to Dunlap and Van Liere (1978) and Dunlap et al. (2000), a person´s environmental
paradigm constitutes a fundamental part of his/her belief system and can be described as
a set of “primitive beliefs” (basic truth state conviction, see Rokeach 1968) which are able to
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influence a wide range of more focused concerns and attitudes (see Schultz et al. 2004). The
NEP (New Environmental Paradigm) items try to tap into the “primitive beliefs” about the
nature of the earth and humanity’s relationship with it.
Dunlap’s ambition to capture the root of personal environmental dispositions has been
criticized by Mayer and Frantz (2004). They do not view the NEP as an adequate measure
of one´s own affective, experiential relationship to the natural world. According to them, the
NEP scale measures cognitive beliefs rather than affective experience. We tend to agree with
their critique because Rokeach’s “primitive belief,” defined as a personal position on whether
something is true or not, is closer to a cognitive belief, i.e. conscious convictions expressible
by language statements. Moreover, Mayer and Frantz (2004) want to concentrate the worldview
construct onto the core social identity – the self. Following the tradition of the ecological
perspective (e.g. Leopold 1970) and many ecopsychologists (e.g. Roszak, Gomes and
Kanner 1995; Roszak 2001; Fischer 2002), they stress the importance of the feeling of connectedness
to the natural world. They continue the discussion about the personal psychological
roots of pro-environmental behaviour by operationalizing the construct of connectedness
to nature as an individual’s affective experiential self-included in nature. Their position is
similar to Schultz (2000), who points out the role of value-objects which are included in the
schema of the self. Schultz evaluates the NEP as being more sociological than psychological
in its stress on the general human-nature relationship, and he calls for analysing the psychological
connection of both concepts (humans and nature) to the cognitive representation of
the self.
The discussion about the core element of the environmental personal disposition and
its psychological nature has an important counterpart in the discussion about the appropriate
methods of its measure. The prevailing method of measuring individual dispositions like
attitudes or worldviews are self-reported questionnaires, which are sometimes called explicit
measures. Schultz and his colleagues (Schultz et al. 2004; Bruni and Schultz 2010) have criticized
questionnaire measures in terms of their dependence on self-report responses. As they
write, first there is a strong social desirability element, and second, these beliefs about one’s
connectedness with nature are considered to be “zero-order” beliefs which are outside of our
sense of self-awareness and might not lend themselves to conscious elaboration and selfreport.
Developments in social cognition research have provided alternative indirect measurement
techniques for assessing personal attitudes outside of self-reports through utilizing the
behavioural reaction time paradigm (see Payne and Gawronski 2010). The constructs of this
indirect measure are usually called implicit and their self-report counterparts explicit. There
exists a debate about the possible different ways of understanding the explicit-implicit differentiation
of attitudes. The initial interpretations stressed the conscious-unconscious conceptualization
(Greenwald and Banaji 1995; cf. Payne and Gawronski 2010: 4); present research
suggests understanding implicit more as automatic rather than unconscious. Implicit-explicit
then generally differentiates the automatic-controlled processes and serves as the basis for the
theories of dual processing cognition (e.g. Evans and Frankish 2009). A prominent example
of such indirect measures of attitudes is the implicit association test (Greenwald, McGhee
and Schwartz 1998). Its self-esteem application (Greenwald and Farnham 2000) was used by
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Schultz et al. (2004) in the development of an indirect measure of the implicit part of the connectedness
to nature construct.
With indirect measures comes the well-known problem of their situational malleability.
The obtained scores of indirect measures often increase, decrease, or even reverse as
a function of the context (see Gawronski and Sritharan 2010). This is one of the reasons
some researchers doubt the dispositional nature of attitudes in general (e.g. Schwarz 2007;
Ledgerwood 2008) and reframe the paradigmatic background of research away from personal
dispositions and towards situated cognition (see Aydede and Robbins 2009). As both stability
and variability are present in measured constructs, researchers resolve the incongruence
by postulating the context sensitivity of evaluative judgements. In this context even the possible
biases of explicit methods such as social desirability and self-presentation are not noise
but an effect of this context sensitivity (Schwarz 2007: 640-641). This could be interpreted as
a need for shifting research attention from the quest to find the true attitude responsible for
the behaviour based on the respective methodology to a more detailed study of the situational
interaction behind the stability-variability problem (ibid.).
This illustrates the dispute about the right methods of assessing the connectedness of
nature between Mayer and Frantz on the one side, and Schultz and his colleagues on the
other (Mayer and Frantz 2004: 504; Bruni and Schultz 2010: 95). Although Mayer and Frantz
(2004) support Schultz’s work with indirect methods, they think that the method is unreliable
because of the low correlations between implicit measures and the measures of relevant
behaviours reported by Schultz (2004), and they come with their own Connectedness
to Nature Scale (CNS) based on a questionnaire. It should measure individuals’ trait levels
of feeling emotionally connected to the natural world. On the other hand, Bruni and Schultz
(2010) criticize Mayer and Frantz for the classic self-report problems. Within the broader
context of these studies, it seems that they both are closer to the connectedness to nature
understood as “real core disposition” than to the situational cognition position, which takes
“evaluative judgments as made on the spot”. But Mayer´s and Schultz´s teams actually study
the context influence when they test the effects of exposure to nature on the malleability of
their constructs (Schultz and Tabanico 2007; Mayer et al. 2009).
Schultz and Tabanico (2007) created a complex field study in which they measured the
implicit connectedness to nature in several physical environments. They found that implicit
associations with nature were malleable within a longer exposure to the natural environment,
such as several hours, and were stable within a small scale exposure, such as a 5-minute walk
in a park (Schultz and Tabanico 2007: 1241). Their results suggest that the connectedness to
nature attitude is not easily changed by the context. Further, because of the complex properties
of the “exposure to natural environment” stimulus, there is not much to say in detail
about the causal interplay of the relevant factors.
Schultz and Tabanico (2007) and Mayer et al. (2009) studied the effect of exposure to
nature due to the assumption of its immediate benefit. They tried to manipulate the nature part
in the self-nature relation. This makes very good sense when we see connectedness to nature
as a core affective experiential trait and if we are looking for how the self is included into
nature. But it could be also interesting to change the focus on how nature is included in the
self. That means, we should try to assess different implicit models of nature and find out how
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the trait is malleable from the other side, i.e. from the situated context of the self. Both of the
studies cited here model nature as an open sky environment filled with organic life (forest,
park, but also zoo) and contrast it with a built artificial environment (buildings, streets, lab).
They do not try to address the problem of defining the border between nature and non-nature.
But if we problematize the self-nature relation from the self-part, e.g. if we change the perspective
from the raw biological effect of the natural environment on humans to the discourse
of environmental education or policy making, the situation is no longer intuitive. It is not possible
to rely on a raw “biological” model of nature contrasted with an artificial one, because
the normative approach has to balance and mix extreme types together in some presupposed
harmony. Environmental policy making cannot work with an isolated value of nature,
because it needs to position it within the frame of other values which are present in society.
This problem of interconnected values brings us back to the system of values or to the worldview
in the context of the broader category of environmental concern, and this offers an additional
line of research. Our current knowledge of the constructs and of the debate about their
nature, as well as our ability to understand their link in the prediction of actual behaviour,
would benefit from further studies of their contextual malleability. If connectedness to nature
is a core construct which affects the related attitudes and values about nature, it should also
be possible to predictively manipulate it from the situated context of the self.
Discourse of Environmental Problems
In the possible set of strategies in present public environmental discourse, there is one typical
frame of portraying the human-nature relationship which makes the human part specifically
relevant. It presents the natural environment as highly damaged by human hubris and
introduces the present state of the natural environment as an imminent global environmental
threat. We could generally recognize it as the apocalyptic discursive pattern (Brummett
1984; O’Leary 1993). A typical example would be the Guggenheim movie An Inconvenient
Truth (2006). Important parts of this discursive pattern are the emotion of fear and the fact of
mortality.
In its scale, the message connects the topic of nature as planetary life and humankind in
such a way that it has almost religious, prophetic connotations (O’Leary 1997). This brings
global relevancy to the matter, but impairs the actual possibility to change it. That is one of
the reasons why some scholars (Arthur and Quester 2004; Hastings, Stead and Webb 2004;
Ruiter, Abraham and Kok 2001) have suggested abandoning this discursive pattern. Although
such general campaigns bring attention to environmental issues, they also instil low behavioural
efficacy due to the impossibility of an individual’s behaviour to avert or remove the
threat (Moser and Dilling 2004). On the contrary, research suggests that providing specific
information aimed at increasing threat-averting behaviour may enhance the effectiveness of
threat appeals (Hartmann 2014). Nevertheless, the scale of the message corresponds well
with the aim of the worldview construct and taps into the responsibility part of the humannature
relationship, even though the responsibility in such a scale (humankind for the planet)
has an almost transcendent dimension.
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We decided to use such a depiction of nature as our “self-part” manipulation. Concerning
the discussion of the rootedness of connectedness to nature, it should be interesting to find
out how the self would connect itself to nature portrayed as a threatening problem for which
the self is possibly responsible. Theoretically, we were inspired by the established line of
research in social psychology studying the adaptive functions of worldview, i.e. the Terror
Management Theory and its manipulative technique of mortality salience, so we defined our
manipulation as (global) environmental problem salience (EPS).
Although mortality salience is considered to be effective universally, the same manipulation
does affect people differently, depending on their worldviews (see Burke, Martens and
Faucher 2010). Some research suggests that mortality salience has a lesser effect on people
with religious worldviews. They can provide a buffer for the death anxiety relief through offering
the means to symbolically live on after death (Landau, Greenberg and Solomon 2004). As
Jong, Halberstadt and Bluemke (2012: 1) put it, a specific cultural worldview allows individuals
to feel like valuable parts of something larger and more enduring than themselves. A key
mechanism in TMT studies is world-view defence. The TMT theory supposes that in the situation
of existential psychic discomfort, endorsing and protecting one’s worldview mitigates the
discomfort. This explains the standard effect of mortality salience manipulation, where people
score higher in the in-group worldview measures. But as Jong, Halberstadt and Bluemke
(2012) show with the case of religious belief, if the people are affected by the manipulation,
they can exhibit a discrepancy between explicit and implicit attitudes. These authors divided
their sample into two groups - atheists and believers, and they found that while the believers
strengthened their beliefs on both implicit and explicit measures, the atheists showed only
higher explicit beliefs. On the implicit measure of supernatural belief realized through a variant
of the implicit association test (IAT), they exhibited a decrease in adhering to their atheistic
worldview. Jong, Halberstadt and Bluemke (2012: 5) explained this effect by a “distinct
cognitive inclination” account of supernatural belief (Norenzayan and Hansen 2006: 183), in
which human beings are naturally and uniquely attracted to believe in supernatural agents. The
universality or naturalness of the human tendency toward supernatural belief and the connectedness
to nature as a core belief are actually both theoretically posited on the argument of evolutionary
history. It should then be natural for humans to feel themselves to be a part of nature.
But it should also be quite natural for humans to weave this affection into their cultural embedding.
This leads us back to the cultural worldview debate.
Experimental study
To explore the theoretical frame, we designed an experimental study. Here we treat connectedness
to nature as a dimension of cultural worldview. We suppose, however, that similar to
religious belief, this may have a universal (non-cultural) grounding.
The key part of the design of the study was the appropriate implementation of the environmental
problem salience manipulation. To make our study more relevant to the research of
the effects of environmental discourse, we have chosen a passive exposure to media material
instead of active self-manipulation where participants write an essay on a specific topic. We
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decided to build our salience manipulation on the immediate effect of video content which
fits the EPS concept (for the use of video in TMT, cf. Pyszczynski 2004).
Michael Jackson’s music video “Earth Song” represents an influential message with
a high degree of the features described above as part of the tragic apocalyptic environmental
discourse. Namely, it possesses a teleological and catastrophic framing which focuses on the
transcendence of the cultural and natural environment which is being destroyed. Even though
it was also accused of being an unoriginal, dramatic showpiece, a ballad with an environmental
and social moral appeal, in 1995 it was a leading hit in many European countries. Despite
the ethos of effective, radical personal action, the song is based on empathy and sorrow. We
have thus chosen this specific video clip of Michael Jackson’s song “Earth Song” as strong
emotional priming. The message points out the responsibility of the human civilization for
environmental problems, and stresses that people’s trust of nature is a necessary mitigating
force in solving these problems. Due to this emotional appeal and spiritual connotation, we
supposed that it should work in our design in a similar way as mortality salience did for religious
belief. On the one side, the video should activate environmental problem associations
and personal attitudes towards nature, and on the other side, it should offer the strategy of
trusting nature as a solution to the problems posed.
We decided to study the effects of the treatment on a divided sample which could reflect
some socio-cultural diversity in relation to nature. To achieve a group cultural worldview
contrast, we based our sample division on a specific socio-cultural background – the choice
of a career in environmental studies. We assumed that no matter the internal diversity, those
who study environmental studies should generally score higher on the connectedness to
nature scales and be better accommodated to the effects of EPS than those who do not study
this field. Therefore, we divided the participants into two groups according their field of
study, which we have shortened as a high environmental profile (students of environmental
studies) and a low environmental profile (other students).
In an analogy to the Jong, Halberstadt and Bluemke (2012) study and in accordance with
the research about the apocalyptic discourse in environmental campaigns, we assume that
the EPS should generally increase the explicit connectedness to nature within the group with
a high pro-environmental profile due the activation of the relevant attitudes. We also predict
that there should be an increase in implicit connectedness to nature for both groups, even
though our manipulation could bring divergent results for our groups, depending on the perceptive
framing of the clip’s second “trust of nature” message.
Along the lines of the Jong, Halberstadt and Bluemke study, our hypothesis is that the
reaction of the low pro-environmental profile group to the treatment would differ in explicit
worldview measures. We therefore predict a decrease in the explicit pro-environmental
worldview as a result of the activation of the world-view defence mechanism. If the treatment
message is interpreted as a problem without a solution, connecting to nature would just
be connecting to an insolvable problem. The situation where nature is in trouble and a person
actually does not have high pro-environmental attitudes should create a cognitive dissonance,
which should be mitigated by endorsing the opposite of pro-nature values. This should be visible
as a decrease in explicit reports of connectedness to nature.
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Methods and Materials
The focus of our pilot empirical study was to determine whether a short laboratory-based
intervention can cause a change in implicit and explicit attitudes measured by tests of personal
attitudes towards nature. We conducted an experimental study on a sample of 77 (32
male and 45 female) participants, mostly students from Masaryk University, Brno, who
responded to our request.
We split the pool of participants according to their field of study, i.e. their (non)affiliation
with environmental studies (47 environmental and 30 other study specializations). The treatment
condition consisted of exposure to the video clip evaluated as a source of Environmental
Problem Salience. Each participant watched the video clip individually. To study the effect
of the treatment, we used one implicit measure and two explicit measures of relationship
to nature: the CNS-IAT Test (Schultz and Tabanico 2007; Greenwald and Farnham 2000)
was implicit, and the New Ecological Paradigm Scale (NEP) (Dunlap et al. 2000), and the
Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS) used by Mayer and Frantz (2004) were explicit. The
CNS-IAT Test was conducted prior to the administration of the NEP and CNS questionnaires.
At the end of the experiment, each participant was asked to self-estimate their environmental
attitude by responding to questions about the number of hours spent weekly in nature
and about whether the participant considers his/her life-style to be connected with nature.
Generally, we have implemented a 2x2 factorial between subjects design with exposure
to the video and an environmental profile as independent variables, and the CNS, NEP and
CNS-IAT as our dependent variables.
Implicit, explicit measures and treatment
As our indirect measure of connectedness to nature, we used the implicit association test
(CNS-IAT), with two categories and two attributes (the construct of self-polarized to self and
not self)2
in the same design as Schultz and Tabanico (2007). For stimuli see Table 1.
As an evaluation method, we used an improved scoring algorithm (Greenwald, Nosek
and Banaji 2003). The resulting D-value is in a range of -2 and 2: the higher the D-value, the
stronger the subject‘s relation towards nature. Due to the known effects of the first contact
category in the test, the results are affected in favour of the pro-environmental attitude. As
we are not interested in the state but in the change of the attitudes between conditions, we did
not vary the order of categories. We used a standard seven blocks IAT procedure, see Table 2.
In our study we used the Connectedness to Nature Scale developed by Mayer and Frantz
(2004) and translated it into Czech. The CNS consists of 14 items designed to measure the
extent to which participants generally feel themselves to be a part of the natural world.
Participants responded to these statements on a 5-point Likert scale (1=strongly disagree;
5=strongly agree).
2 The IAT script was created by modifying the standard Self Esteem IAT Inquisit script (available
from http://www.millisecond.com/download/library/IAT/).
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Table 1: Categories and Words of CNS-IAT (Schultz and Tabanico 2007)
Category Nature
(„Přírodní“)
Built
(„Vytvořené
lidmi“)
Me
(„Já“)
Not me
(„Ne já“)
Items Birds („Ptáci“) Car („Auto“) I („Já“) It („To“)
Plants („Rostliny“) City
(„Město“)
Me
(„Mne“)
Other
(„Druzí“)
Whales („Velryby“) Factory
(„Továrna“)
Mine
(„Můj“)
Their
(„Jejich“)
Trees
(„Stromy“)
Street
(„Ulice“)
Myself
(„Sebou“)
Them
(„Jim“)
Water
(„Voda“)
Computer
(„Počítač“)
Self
(„Sebe“)
They
(„Oni“)
My („Moje“) Theirs („Jimi“)
Note: Categories and stimuli were translated into the Czech language, some words were modified.
Table 2: Sequence of CNS-IAT Procedure
1. Me vs. Not me
2. Nature vs. Built
3. Me - Nature vs. Not me - Built: train
4. Me - Nature vs. Not me - Built: test
5. Built vs. Nature
6. Me - Built vs. Not me - Nature: train
7. Me - Built vs. Not me - Nature: test
We also used the revised version of the New Ecological Paradigm Scale (Dunlap et al. 2000)
which consists of 15 items. The items in the scale were rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1=
strongly disagree; 5= strongly agree).
As additional scales, our experimental study contained two additional questions which
focused on the relationship of our respondents towards nature. The first asked, “How many
hours do you spend weekly in nature? (e.g. walking outdoors, cycling, playing games, doing
sports, camping, fishing, reading outdoors, yard work, etc.).” The respondents were asked
to place their answers on the given scale of six alternatives – from almost no time to plus
21 hours.
The second question had the following wording: “Most people follow a certain lifestyle
in their life. When you think about it, would you say that your lifestyle is connected to
nature?” The answers were recorded on a 5-point Likert scale.
At the very end of the session, all participants filled in several demographic questions.
We were interested in their age, occupation, field of study, and the size of the municipality
they live in.
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The treatment was designed to affect the participants’ attitudes towards nature. During
this period, individuals watched the video clip of Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song” on a laptop
computer screen. The video screen was maximized and Czech subtitles were included.
The concept of “environmental problem salience” is our innovation, so there is no standard
proved operationalization. We assessed the video in a preliminary small study (N=10) which
consisted of writing a short associative essay about the participants’ feelings after watching
it. From these essays, we have concluded that the video clip does affect the participants’ feelings
concerning the state of nature and human responsibility for it, i.e. the clip creates a state
of “environmental problem salience” in the participants’ minds.
Methods and data acquisition
The participants were randomly assigned to “BASE” and “TREATMENT” groups. The subjects
in the BASE group conducted the experiment without the video intervention and the
subjects in the TREATMENT group watched the Jackson video and performed the tests afterwards.
The study design is shown in Table 3. Altogether 42 subjects (17 men, 25 women,
26.2 ± 6.2 years old) participated in the BASE version of the study, 35 subjects (15 men, 20
women, 26.3 ± 4.7 years old) in the TREATMENT version. The groups did not significantly
differ in the age (p = 0.33) or gender (p = 0.83) of the participants.
To address our assumption of diverse results in subjects with high and low pro-environmental
attitudes, we divided the participants’ data according to their field of study. The field
of study was assessed as environmental studies and other studies. Henceforth, we will mark
these subgroups as l-pro(study) and h-pro(study) referring to expected low pro-environmental
and high pro-environmental attitudes.
Eighteen l-pro and 24 h-pro subjects were present in the BASE group, 12 l-pro and 23
h-pro in the TREATMENT group. The BASE and TREATMENT groups did not significantly
differ in the fields of study of their subjects (p = 0.44).
Table 3: Experimental design adopted in this study to evaluate effect of the treatment
Group Base Treatment
Pre-treatment phase Introduction Introduction
Treatment No Yes
Post-treatment phase
IAT IAT
NEP questionnaire NEP questionnaire
CNS questionnaire CNS questionnaire
demographics questions demographics questions
self-estimated environmental attitude
questions
self-estimated environmental attitude
questions
The whole procedure was administered through a personal computer. Each participant was
tested individually. After introductory spoken instructions by an administrator, the participant
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was guided by onscreen instructions. Explicit questionnaires were provided by Google Forms.
The IAT test was administered on a computer with a trial version of Inquisit 4 software.
Data pre-processing and analysis
The NEP and CNS batteries contain questions whose meanings are opposite to the other
questionnaires, therefore some answers were reversed in order to correspond. This is the case
for all the NEP answers to the even questions and the CNS answers to question numbers 4,
12 and 14. Further, the global scores of explicit tests (NEP, CNS scores) were computed and
quantified in a range from 0 to 1. In all responses, the higher the value, the higher the participant’s
pro-environmental attitude in that aspect.
Cronbach’s alpha was used to evaluate reliability for both batteries. For the NEP it was
0.837 and for the CNS it was 0.839, suggesting a high consistency within both batteries.
Because of the non-Gaussian distributions of the data, we have implemented the McCall
area transformation (Krus and Krus 1977; McCall 1922), using percentiles of the original
values of a given variable and transforming them to values from the normal distribution of
a zero mean and standard deviation equal to one.
Using MANCOVA, we have evaluated the effect of the intervention (treatment) on
implicit and explicit scales separately for the high- and low-profile environmental groups (as
the interaction between independent factors “treatment” and “environmental profile”), with
control of covariates (gender (Zelezny, Chua and Aldrich 2000), age). To justify the importance
of this interaction, we also report the effect of the environmental profile (the field of
study) on the scales.
To provide the relations between the tests, the Pearson and Spearman correlations were
used according to the data distributions (relations computed on the whole dataset and separately
for subgroups).
Results
Targeting our assumption about the differences between low and high pro-environmentally
oriented respondents, MANCOVA revealed statistical significance (p < 0.001) and post-hoc
tests found this difference in both the NEP and life-style related to nature, and the trends in
the CNS and IAT (Xl-pro study < Xh-pro study), see Table 4 for respective p-values. Figure 1 illustrates
these differences.
The MANCOVA further did not reveal any statistically significant general effect of
treatment (p = 0.531). We hypothesized an interactive effect of the treatment and the environmental
profile and measured a trend (p = 0.165); exploratory descriptive analysis shows
a marginally significant effect of the field of study and the treatment interaction on the IAT
(both Xl-pro study TREATMENT < Xl-pro study BASE < Xh-pro study BASE < Xh-pro study TREATMENT), and the hours spent
in nature (Xh-pro study BASE < Xl-pro study BASE< Xl-pro study TREATMENT < Xh-pro study TREATMENT). Table 5 captures
the post-hoc results. The differences are depicted in boxplots (see Figure 2).
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SOCIÁLNÍ STUDIA 3/2015
Table 4: The effects of the field of study on implicit and explicit scales and environmental attitude
questions
Test IAT NEP CNS
connectedness
of life-style with
nature
number of hours
subject spent
per week in
nature
Group h-pro l-pro h-pro l-pro h-pro l-pro h-pro l-pro h-pro l-pro
p 0.188 < 0.001* 0.062 0.004* 0.274
Mean
±
STD
0.16 ±
0.93
-0.17 ±
1.04
0.15 ±
1.06
-0.52 ±
0.78
0.21 ±
0.97
-0.49 ±
0.96
-0.30 ±
0.82
-0.81 ±
0.69
-0.65 ±
1.06
-0.53 ±
1.03
Note: P-values of the differences displayed, significant differences (p < 0.05) highlighted by asterisks.
Figure 1: The general effects of a) treatment, b) the field of study on explicit, implicit scales and self-evaluated
questions about the connectedness of life-style with nature (marked as life-style) and number
of hours the subject spent per week in nature (marked as nature-hours).
Note: The y-axis values come from normalized scores. Numbers at extreme values mark incident subjects.
Considering the relations between factors, including covariates, a significant correlation
was measured between the field of study and gender (p < 0.001, ρ = 0.461), meaning that the
division into h-pro and l-pro subjects includes more women in the h-pro subgroup. Further,
the gender covariate has a significant influence on the IAT (p = 0.030) and the CNS (p =
0.006). Other variables are not significantly influenced by covariates.
As mentioned above, we are aware of the gender differences and are using gender as
a covariate to ensure the analysis would not be misleading, although we have further examined
this difference. The difference between males and females was found in every explicit and implicit
score (pNEP = 0.057, pCNS < 0.001, pIAT = 0.002, in all cases the Xmale < Xfemale), the difference was
also found in the self-evaluated connectedness of life-style with nature (p = 0.003, Xmale < Xfemale).
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T. Chabada, T. Hampejs, J. Skalík, E. Bujnošková, J. Hlinka: Connecting to Nature in the Lab...
Table 5: The effects of interaction of environmental profile and treatment, on implicit and explicit scales
and environmental attitude questions
Test IAT NEP CNS
connectedness
of life-style with
nature
number of hours
subject spent
per week in
nature
Group Base
Treat-
ment
Base
Treat-
ment
Base
Treat-
ment
Base
Treat-
ment
Base
Treat-
ment
p 0.161†
0.226 0.702 0.279 0.099†
h-pro:
Mean
±
STD
0.16 ±
0.93
0.44 ±
1.19
0.15 ±
1.06
0.47 ±
0.86
0.21 ±
0.97
0.36 ±
0.83
-0.30 ±
0.82
-0.11 ±
0.84
-0.65 ±
1.06
0.24 ±
0.94
h-pro:
Cohen’s d
0.260 0.332 0.166 0.229 0.888
l-pro:
Mean
±
STD
-0.17 ±
1.04
-0.58 ±
1.07
-0.52 ±
0.78
-0.71 ±
0.73
-0.49 ±
0.96
-0.52 ±
0.98
-0.81 ±
0.69
-1.03 ±
0.58
-0.53 ±
1.03
-0.44 ±
0.92
l-pro:
Cohen’s d
0.389 0.251 0.031 0.345 0.092
Note: P-values of the differences displayed, no significant differences (p < 0.05) found. Cohen’s d as a measure
of effect size (Cohen 1988). (†
= debated result)
Figure 2: The effect of interaction between treatment and environmental profile (field of study).
Note: The y-axis values come from normalized scores. Numbers at extreme values mark incident subjects.
We also aimed to analyse the discrepancy between the IAT and the explicit scores, and
how it differs among the subgroups. For each subject, the explicit value was subtracted from
the IAT D-value, both normalized (the same McCall area transformation as in the previous
analysis). These differences follow the Gaussian distribution (p = 0.200), therefore the same
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SOCIÁLNÍ STUDIA 3/2015
MANCOVA test was used – the effect of gender and age was regressed out. The analysis
revealed a non-significant effect of the environmental profile (field of study; p = 0.164).
Table 6 and Table 7 show the post-hoc results of the discrepancies. The negative average
values indicate that the explicit score is higher than the IAT and the positive average value
means that the explicit score is lower than the IAT. We have found a non-significant difference
on the “IAT-NEP scissors” in the field of study variable (p=0.115) where the more proenvironmentally
inclined subjects have more consistent implicit and explicit attitudes (the
average difference is close to zero) than the less pro-environmentally inclined subjects who
score, on average, higher on the IAT than on the NEP.
Table 6: Effect of the field of study on the discrepancies between implicit IAT test and explicit scores
Tests IAT - NEP IAT - CNS
Group h-pro l-pro h-pro l-pro
p 0.115†
0.757
Mean ± STD 0.02 ± 1.57 0.35 ± 1.39 -0.05 ± 1.28 0.32 ± 1.14
Note: † = debated result
In contrast to our predictions, we did not find any increased “implicit-explicit” scissors
between the groups after the treatment. The treatment did not polarize the groups according
to the implicit-explicit consistency.
Table 7: Effect of treatment plus the field of study interaction on the discrepancies between implicit IAT
test and explicit scores
Tests IAT - NEP IAT - CNS
Group Base Treatment Base Treatment
p 0.817 0.415
h-pro: Mean ± STD 0.02 ± 1.57 -0.33 ± 1.58 -0.05 ± 1.28 0.08 ± 1.46
l-pro: Mean ± STD 0.35 ± 1.39 0.13 ± 1.17 0.32 ± 1.14 -0.06 ± 1.19
Finally, we examined the correlations among the measures we had used. Since we did
not find a significant effect of the treatment on the implicit and explicit scales, we decided
to concentrate our analysis on the whole set of subjects. Pearson correlations were calculated
to provide the relations between the normalized scores of the IAT, NEP and CNS.
Spearman correlations were calculated to examine the relations of all measures with questions
about connectedness of life-style with nature and the number of hours a subject spent
in nature per week.
Our analysis revealed that the IAT significantly correlated only with the CNS (r = 0.230;
p = 0.045). The results showed significant correlations of the NEP and the CNS (r = 0.342;
p = 0.002) and correlations of the question about connectedness of life-style with nature with
both the NEP (r = 0.246; p = 0.029) and the CNS (r = 0.367; p = 0.001). The question about
the self-evaluated hours spent in nature per week did not correlate with any other measure.
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T. Chabada, T. Hampejs, J. Skalík, E. Bujnošková, J. Hlinka: Connecting to Nature in the Lab...
Discussion
The rationale of our study was in the expected analogy of connectedness to nature as
a dimension of a cultural worldview. We aimed to study the effects of environmental problem
salience (EPS) manipulation on two groups based on their environmental profile as
Jong, Halberstadt and Bluemke (2012) studied the effects of mortality salience manipulation
on a sample divided into two groups based on their worldview. We were interested to see if
a short laboratory-based intervention manipulating the human-nature relation from the selfpart
is capable of causing a change in implicit and explicit attitudes towards nature.
In line with our expectations, we have found significant differences between the high
and low pro-environmental subgroups (see Table 4 and Figure 1). The participants studying
environmental studies scored significantly higher on the NEP and connectedness of life-style
with nature question than the participants from other fields of study, and this trend can also
be seen in the CNS and IAT results. Similar effects were also found in some previous studies
(Mayer and Frantz 2004; Bruni and Schultz 2010). The groups´ differences created the
needed experimental conditions for studying the effects of EPS manipulation on a divided
sample to achieve a group cultural worldview contrast.
Given our main assumptions about the different reactions within the grouped sample, we
need to look at the interactive effect of the treatment and the environmental profile (see Table
5 and Figure 2). Even though the effects were not statistically significant, we provide a tentative
interpretation. Contrary to our predictions, the results of the implicit pro-environmental
worldview measured by the CNS-IAT did not increase in both groups after the treatment, but
actually decreased in the group with a low pro-environmental profile. On the other hand, the
effect of the treatment on explicit attitudes was present as predicted. We interpret this in two
ways. First, our implementation of the EPS did not penetrate to the personal core attitudes
towards nature in the same way as mortality salience does towards people’s certainty about
supernatural existence, i.e. our operationalization of the EPS manipulation was inefficient in
creating the blind alley of existential uncertainty. Second, and more importantly, our relation
of the EPS and connectedness to nature actually reflects more of a cultural rather than
existential conflict, or, more specifically, our treatment created a socio-culturally constructed
existential conflict rather than an individually existential one. This allowed the participants
with a low environmental profile to refuse the anxiety more easily through dissociation of
their selves from the nature specifically framed by the treatment. Where individually constructed
and experienced mortality salience is hardly avoidable, the socio-culturally constructed
one is avoidable by challenging the content as implausible. The explicit endorsement
of a low environmental worldview by the low environmental profile participants could be an
effect of an activated defence mechanism reacting to anxiety or actually just a framing effect
of the precaution towards a possible instalment of such anxiety. It would not be a reaction to
the felt problem, it would be a complete avoidance of the problem by framing it as a personally
implausible problem or as someone else’s problem.
The shifts in the results within the CNS and NEP explicit scales in both groups were
more consistent with our predictions. The scores in the high pro-environmental profile group
increased after the treatment, whereas the scores in the low pro-environmental profile group
decreased. This tendency was more noticeable within the NEP scale, which may imply
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SOCIÁLNÍ STUDIA 3/2015
a stronger bond between this scale and the selected EPS manipulation (“Earth Song”). In this
respect, we agree with other authors (Mayer and Frantz 2004; Schultz et al. 2004) who stress
that the NEP measures cognitive beliefs and is oriented toward a general human-nature relationship.
This scale appears suitable for reflecting the effects of EPS manipulation, since the
message of “Earth Song” points out the responsibility of human civilization for environmental
problems.
In our predictions, we assumed that the treatment would cause a discrepancy between
explicit and implicit attitudes in the low environmental profile participants. The prediction
was shown to be unfounded by the opposite than expected change in the implicit attitudes
towards nature within the low environmental profile group. Generally, our high variation in
the data does not allow us to determine any conclusive specific relation between implicit and
explicit attitudes. Moreover, we have to reject our hypothesis about the cognitive dissonance
between the feeling and conscious reflection in the low environmental profile group. The data
suggest that the participants actually avoided dissonance, or we were not able measure it.
We were also interested in the statistical relationships between the selected measures.
The only correlation between the implicit and explicit scale was identified in the relation
between the IAT and CNS. A comparable correlation between these measurements was
identified also by Mayer and Frantz (2004). Following the results obtained by Schultz et
al. (2004), we did not find a correlation between the IAT and NEP. Our results support the
assumption of a closer tie between the CNS and IAT rather than a link between the NEP and
IAT; both the CNS and the IAT are designed to measure the affective sense of connectedness
to nature. The identified correlations between the NEP and CNS were also reported by Mayer
and Frantz (2004). The question about the connectedness of life-style with nature correlated
with both the NEP and CNS, but not with the IAT. This question seems to be closer to the
CNS, because it asks about an individual´s connection with nature, which is reflected also in
its stronger correlation.
Our analysis of the gender effects showed that female participants scored higher than
male participants in both explicit and implicit measures (IAT, NEP, CNS, life-style). These
findings are in line with the previous studies using the IAT (Schultz and Tabanico 2007;
Bruni and Schultz 2010) and the NEP (Zelezny, Chua and Aldrich 2000), and they extend the
results to the CNS and life-style.
Although statistically inconclusive, our results seem to support the critique of the apocalyptical
discursive pattern. The EPS treatment made salient thinking about the problematic
state of nature and the direction of reaction was dependent on the environmental profile of the
participant. It worked contrary to the message intention for those it should have convinced,
even though it activated the pro-environmental attitudes in those who already had them. We
assume that the effect of such priming manipulation is short-term, although it reflects specific
real life conditions of environmental communication. We generally explain it in terms
of situational malleability, particularly context sensitivity of evaluative judgments cognition
(Schwarz 2007). Our empirical findings and their consequences for environmental communication
are in alignment with an interesting study by Harrison and Mallett (2013), who used
mortality salience (Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski 1997) manipulation directly in
the context of pro-environmental values and human responsibility for the destruction of the
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T. Chabada, T. Hampejs, J. Skalík, E. Bujnošková, J. Hlinka: Connecting to Nature in the Lab...
natural environment (ecoguilt). We fully agree with their results suggesting that ecoguilt creates
a potential pro-environmental behaviour only in those who already actively endorse proenvironmental
values.
Conclusions, limitations and future work
We conclude that the current study has not provided sufficient evidence for a robust malleability
of implicit and explicit attitudes by experimental manipulation in a laboratory setting.
The inconclusiveness of the current study can be ascribed to several limitations of the experimental
design. It looks like the effect of the manipulation was present in the data, but it was
weak because of the indirect coupling between the independent and dependent variables. Our
manipulation targeted the self-part of the human-nature relationship and accentuated especially
the responsibility for the problematic state of nature, yet we tried to detect the effect
on the general attitude to nature. In a way, we measured something different than we manipulated.
We assume that the effect would be more robust on attitudes towards responsibility
for the state of the natural environment, however we wanted to find out if this manipulation
would be visible in basic attitudes. We suppose the explanation for the low significance of the
results needs to be searched for in the operationalization and implementation of the experiment,
especially in controlling our sample and in the participants’ subjective strategies for
interpreting the treatment material.
The trends in the sample divided by environmental profiles show that the manipulation
probably has quite different effects based on the specific previous behaviour (choice of the
field of study) relevant to worldview. Our results suggest that our treatment differentially
affects groups with different worldviews. This promises that an even more robust effect could
have been observed if we had taken the intragroup differences into account. The worldview
division of a high and low environmental profile based just on the field of study is too rough
due to the internal variation of the worldview in such groups. We suppose that a sample
divided by some finer tool, like a scale of environmental profile, would decrease the variation
and the effect of the EPS would become significant. It would be more appropriate to create
the environmental profile through an assessed continuous worldview dimension and not as
a social category.
We suppose that a substantial part of the data variability comes from the specific realization
of the EPS treatment via the “Earth Song” video which contains not only the EPS
but also offers a specific solution to the EPS. We were aware that such a complex message
could have different connotations for different participants based on their background, yet
we did not control for these differences because of the general point we tried to make – we
were interested in effect of the general malleability of the connectedness to nature construct
in the direction of environmental campaign research. Nevertheless, no matter the scope of
possible interpretations, it would have been helpful to control for each participant’s reception
of the video content. From a methodological perspective, the design of the control
group also suffers from a non-equivalent condition. While the participants exposed to the
treatment watched a music video, the participants in the control group completely skipped
the stimulation part.
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SOCIÁLNÍ STUDIA 3/2015
We need to further highlight that the selected form of EPS manipulation is not ideally
suited to the selected measurement tools. Environmental attitude measured as connectedness
to nature is something different than holding an environmental paradigm (which may
appear controversial) or a feeling of responsibility towards environmental problems. To create
a broader understanding of our results, it would be useful to have a baseline for the chosen
implicit measure where we could use clear raw nature treatment material, i.e. we should study
the malleability effects with artificial natural environment exposure (pictures, or video of raw
nature, cf. Mayer et al. 2009) and supplement our EPS treatment with the indirect measure of
felt responsibility towards nature.
Our experimental study wanted to explore the situational malleability of selected attitudes
towards nature by inducing a specific global context of human-nature relation and by
framing the natural environment as a problem. We tried to adjust basic attitudes towards
nature in accordance with the adhered worldview differences to reflect some environmental
communication research. We also wanted to highlight some methodological aspects of
attitudes research. We tried to follow Schwarz (2007: 640) in the conviction that the context
sensitivity of evaluative judgements cognition, which is behind the malleability of attitudes,
should be taken seriously and not just from a bias perspective. The research effort in optimizing
our measuring tools of “true” behaviour predicting attitudes towards nature should be
supplemented by giving more attention to the research of cognitive aspects of different social
situations in which people encounter nature. An understanding of different implicit models of
nature, and possibly also of the human-nature relation, could enroot the research of environmental
attitudes in a broader cultural and consequently universal scope.
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Authors
Tomáš Chabada is a third year Ph.D. student at the Department of Environmental Studies,
Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Brno. He focuses on the topic of environmental
justice and studies the interactions between the size of the human population and the
environment. He also participates in academic projects and initiatives bridging academia and
the NGO sector.
Contact: tomaschabada@gmail.com
Tomáš Hampejs is a Ph.D. student at the Department for the Study of Religions, Faculty of
Arts, Masaryk University, Brno. He is interested in cognitive science of religion and social
implicit cognition, and in his dissertation project he explores the situational cognitive aspects
of religious belief formation.
Contact: tomas.hampejs@mail.muni.cz
Jan Skalík is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Environmental Studies, Faculty of Social
Studies, Masaryk University, Brno. Among his interests is environmental politics, particularly
the pro-environmental attitudes and political strategies of Czech politicians. He cooperates
with several NGOs.
Contact: skalik@mail.muni.cz
Eva Bujnošková is a second year Ph.D. student at Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University,
Brno. Her main research activity lies in studying brain functional connectivity with an
approach of complex network analysis and evaluating alterations in disease. She is also
a member of the Laboratory of Advanced Network Technologies, Faculty of Informatics,
Masaryk University, and participates in neuroscientific and sociological academic projects.
Contact: eva.bujnoskova@mail.muni.cz
Jaroslav Hlinka works on the characterization of spatiotemporal patterns in real-world
complex dynamic systems. He specializes in the study of brain activity with neuroimaging
methods and mathematical modelling, but is involved in research in other areas including
climate dynamics and social and economic networks. He currently serves as the head
of the Department of Nonlinear Dynamics and Complex Systems at the Institute of Computer
Science, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, and leads the Brain Modelling Workgroup
at the National Institute of Mental Health in Klecany.
Contact: hlinka@cs.cas.cz