Imagining a Sustainable World: Measuring Cognitive Alternatives to the Environmental Status Quo

Abstract

We build on social identity models of environmental collective action by considering the role ofpeople’s access to cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo. We developed a new measure of cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo, and examined its ability to predict environmental activist identification and willingness to engage in environmental activism. In Study 1 (N = 386), we developed the initial scale, and found evidence for its reliability and validity. The ability to imagine cognitive alternatives was associated with other relevant social identity and environmental variables including perceived legitimacy of the current environmental status quo, pro-environmental consumer and activist behavior, and beliefs in anthropogenic climate change. In Study 2 (N = 393), we confirmed the factor structure of the scale and found that it was a strong predictor of environmental activist identification, explaining variance beyond extensive control variables including identification with nature. It also explained additional variance in willingness to engage in activist behavior beyond even environmental activist identification. Our results suggest that the ability to imagine cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo might have important implications for whether people engage in pro-environmental collection action to mitigate climate-change and other environmental problems.

Access to Environmental Cognitive Alternatives Predicts Pro-Environmental Activist Behavior

“…How can these collective acts in support of climate action be explained, and how can further collective action in support of proenvironmental initiatives be promoted? Drawing on Social Identity Theory (SIT), Wright, Schmitt, Mackay, & Neufeld (2020) proposed that engagement in environmental collective action would be more likely for people who can clearly imagine what a sustainable world would be like. In two studies, they demonstrated that being able to imagine what a sustainable world would be like is associated with self-reported pro-environmental behavior and self-reported willingness to engage in pro-environmental collective action in the future.…”

“…Additionally, there is evidence that politicized identities-identification with activist groups-is a stronger and more proximal predictor of collective action than identification with broader categories (Schmitt, Mackay, Droogendyk, & Payne, 2019;Simon & Klandermans, 2001;Simon et al, 1998). For example, Schmitt et al (2019) and Wright et al (2020) found stronger correlations between politicized environmental identification and pro-environmental activist behaviors than between identification with nature and pro-environmental activist behaviors.…”

“…Within the environmental status quo, cognitive alternatives can take several forms and involve multiple intergroup relations. A detailed account of cognitive alternatives within the environmental context is given in Wright et al (2020). At a basic level, cognitive alternatives reflect a vision of how the status relations between humans and the rest of nature could be different.…”

“…However, humans are not a unified group and there are intergroup relations within the category humans that are also relevant to addressing climate change. How humans relate to nature depends, in part, on other intergroup relations, such as those "between industry, capital, and government, between citizens and government, between corporations and citizens, between elite groups and the majority of people on the planet, and between activist groups that challenge fossil fuel infrastructure projects and the businesses and governments that support those projects" (Wright et al, 2020). Environmental cognitive alternatives will also likely include changes to these status relations as well, reducing the status and power of the higher status group and increasing the status and power of lower status groups, leading to direct confrontation between the two.…”

“…Even in non-environmental contexts, cognitive alternatives have rarely been measured and when they have, this has involved ad hoc measures (e.g., Zhang et al, 2013). To fill this gap, Wright et al (2020) introduced the Environmental Cognitive Alternatives Scale (ECAS), and found that environmental cognitive alternatives (e.g., imagining a world without fossil fuels or imagining a world in which governments reflect the interests of the natural environment rather than the interests of the wealthy) explained variability in willingness to engage in proenvironmental activist behaviors even when controlling for other known antecedents of collective action.…”