Environment-Specific vs. General Knowledge and Their Role in Pro-environmental Behavior

Abstract

Environmental knowledge has been established as a behavior-distal, but necessary antecedent of pro-environmental behavior. The magnitude of its effect is difficult to estimate due to methodological deficits and variability of measures proposed in the literature. This paper addresses these methodological issues with an updated, comprehensive and objective test of environmental knowledge spanning a broad variety of current environment related topics. In a multivariate study ( n = 214), latent data modeling was employed to explore the internal factor structure of environmental knowledge, its relationship with general knowledge and explanatory power on pro-environmental behavior. We tested competing factor models and uncovered a general factor of environmental knowledge. The main novel finding of the study concerns its relationship with general knowledge. Employing an established test of general knowledge to measure crystallized intelligence revealed a near perfect relationship between environmental and general knowledge. This general knowledge (including the environmental domain) accounted for 7% of the variance in environmentally significant behavior. Age, additionally to acquired education, emerged as a common predictor for both general knowledge and environmentally significant behavior. We discuss the consequences of the strong relation between general and environmental knowledge and provide a possible explanation for the positive age-environmental conservation relationship reported in the literature.

Roles of Environmental System Knowledge in Promoting University Students’ Environmental Attitudes and Pro-Environmental Behaviors

“…However, students' engagement in direct impact PEBs (e.g., waster separation, energy-saving behavior, and reuse and recycling behaviors) cannot be enhanced by only students' participation in an environmental course. As found in the study of Geiger et al [75], though people had a high level of both general and environmental knowledge such as knowledge of ecological systems, sustainability issues, effective actions and environmental situations, their engagement in PEBs was merely average. Several studies indicated the influence of other factors on PEBs engagement.…”

The Knowledge and Value Basis of Private Forest Management in Sweden: Actual Knowledge, Confidence, and Value Priorities

“…It is furthermore important to distinguish between objective (or actual) and subjective (or self-rated) assessments of knowledge (Shi et al 2016). Whereas measures of objective knowledge employ knowledge questions (true/false or multiple choice), subjective knowledge represents a self-assessment of, for example, familiarity, awareness, or level of knowledge (Steele et al 2006;Marzano et al 2017), thus resembling the concept of self-efficacy, i.e., the belief in one's own ability to act (Bandura 1977) (Geiger et al 2019a).…”

Why Ecological Footprint Calculators Should Move beyond Information Provision – An Empirical Study of the Relationship between Environmental Knowledge and Ecological Footprint

“…Possibly as a result of this, evidence about the relationship between environmental knowledge and pro-environmental behaviour is highly varied. Many studies have found a direct positive relationship [11,[47][48][49][50][51], but others have only found indirect effects. Most notably, meta-analyses [52,53] support an indirect positive relationship of environmental knowledge and pro-environmental behaviour, mediated by behavioural intentions, normative variables and guilt.…”