Seebauer Sebastian, Ellmer Hans Peter
LIFE Institute for Climate, Energy and Society, Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, Graz, Austria.
Front Psychol. 2023 Feb 9;14:1117452. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1117452. eCollection 2023.
Efforts to promote climate-friendly consumption need to address groups of interrelated behaviours; however, experts and laypeople have different perspectives on which climate-relevant behaviours belong together. Understanding laypeople's mental representations, or the perceived similarity of behaviours, may provide orientation on which behaviours should be promoted in concert in order to communicate comprehensibly and to catalyse spillover. The present study uses data on perceived similarity between 22 climate-relevant behaviours collected from 413 young adults in Austria in an open card sorting task. Five posited categorisations by domain, location, impact, difficulty, and frequency are tested in a confirmatory approach for their fit with the observed similarity patterns. By analysing co-occurrence matrices, edit distances and similarity indices, the best fit is found for the null hypothesis of random assignment. Ranking by test statistics shows that the domain categorisation fits next best, followed by impact, frequency, difficulty, and location. The categories of waste and advocacy behaviours emerge consistently in lay mental representations. The categories of behaviours with a high carbon footprint and difficult behaviours that are performed by few other people stand out from other, less extreme behaviours. Categorisation fit is not moderated by personal norms, stated competencies, and environmental knowledge. The analytical approaches for confirmatory testing of expected categorisations against observed similarity patterns may be applied to analyse any card sorting data.
促进气候友好型消费的努力需要关注相互关联的行为群体；然而，专家和普通人对于哪些与气候相关的行为属于同一类别有着不同的看法。了解普通人的心理表征，即对行为的感知相似性，可能有助于确定哪些行为应该协同推广，以便进行有效的沟通并促进溢出效应。本研究使用了在奥地利对413名年轻人进行的开放式卡片分类任务中收集到的关于22种与气候相关行为的感知相似性数据。通过验证性方法测试了按领域、地点、影响、难度和频率进行的五种假定分类与观察到的相似性模式的契合度。通过分析共现矩阵、编辑距离和相似性指数，发现随机分配的零假设最符合观察结果。按检验统计量排序表明，领域分类其次符合，其次是影响、频率、难度和地点。在普通人的心理表征中，废物和倡导行为类别始终出现。高碳足迹行为类别和很少有人进行的困难行为类别与其他不太极端的行为有所不同。分类契合度不受个人规范、陈述的能力和环境知识的调节。针对观察到的相似性模式对预期分类进行验证性测试的分析方法可用于分析任何卡片分类数据。
