A social-psychological model is developed to examine the proposition that environmentalism represents a new way of thinking. It presumes that action in support of environmental quality may derive from any of three value orientations: egoistic, social-altruistic, or biospheric, and that gender may be implicated in the relation between these orientations and behavior. Behavioral intentions are modeled as the sum across values of the strength of a value times the strength of beliefs about the consequences of environmental conditions for valued objects. Evidence from a survey of 349 college students shows that beliefs about consequences for each type of valued object independently predict willingness to take political action, but only beliefs about consequences for self reliably predict willingness to pay through taxes. This result is consistent with other recent findings from contingent valuation surveys. Women have stronger beliefs than men about consequences for self, others, and the biosphere, but there is no gender difference in the strength of value orientations.

Discoveries in environmental science become the raw material for constructing social attitude objects, individual attitudes, and broad public concerns. We explored a model in which individuals construct attitudes to new or emergent attitude objects by referencing personal values and beliefs about the consequences of the objects for their values. We found that a subset of the major clusters identified in value theory is associated with willingness to take proenvironmental action; that a biospheric value orientation cannot yet be discerned in a general population sample; that willingness to take proenvironmental action is a function of both values and beliefs, with values also predicting beliefs; and that gender differences can be attributed to both beliefs and values. Our model has promise for explicating the factors determining public concern with environmental conditions.

Objective. The social psychological values altruism, self-interest, traditionalism, and openness to change are key correlates of environmental concern and proenvironmental behavior. We investigate the relationship between gender and these values to better understand gender differences in environmentalism. We consider both gender differences in value priorities (differences in mean response on value scales) and differences in the meaning of values (differences in the factor structure of values) as well. Methods. Our analysis is based on data from a random-digit dialed national telephone survey of U.S. adults conducted in 1994. We examine differences in factor structure of values for a group of 145 white men and 200 white women using confirmatory factor analysis and differences in mean value scores using multivariate analysis of variance. Results. We find no substantial differences in value factor structure, but differences in value priorities, with women ranking altruism as more important than men. Conclusions. Our analysis supports work that focuses on mean differences in environmentalism across genders without examining gender differences in factor structure, although further examination of gender differences in factor structure is warranted. Our results also highlight the importance of gender differences in altruism as a basis for gender differences in environmentalism.Over the last decade, a number of studies have suggested that values should be considered a core concept in the study of environmentalism, thus linking research on environmentalism with the social psychological literature on values (Dietz and Sterninitial argument for a value-based approach to environmentalism, noted the potential importance of gender as a source of variation in environmental values. There is a robust tradition of research on gender dif-