Social Support for Water Quality: The Influence of Values and Symbolic Racism

Abstract

Many communities, especially minority communities, have to deal with contaminated water supplies. Remediating such risks is usually expensive, so requires action from state and/or federal governments. In turn, this requires political support for provision of a collective good, an altruistic action. We use data from a Mechanical Turk convenience sample to examine the influence of values and beliefs on donations to remediate water quality, using actual donations to an environmental group as our dependent variable. We find that views about minorities are the strongest predictor of donations, with symbolic racism-beliefs that minorities have received advantageous treatment-substantially reducing donations. In addition, altruistic values have an indirect effect of increasing the likelihood of donating while selfinterested values reduce donations. It appears that support for collective action on water quality is closely tied with both altruism and racial views, suggesting links between research on environmental justice and on environmental decision-making.

Diverse segments of the US public underestimate the environmental concerns of minority and low-income Americans

“…Indeed, in some contexts, prodiversity messages can be perceived by members of the majority group as biased, reducing these individuals' support for diversity initiatives (37). Moreover, efforts to address race-based inequities in environmental harms may be met with resistance by individuals who perceive that minorities have received advantageous treatment (22). Thus, racial bias may also hinder public support for addressing disparities, which may hold implications for how people respond to the types of diversity messaging examined here.…”

“…These rapidly shifting demographics underscore a need for research that can inform efforts to broaden public participation in environmental decision making, and particularly among growing segments of the public that are disproportionately affected by environmental problems. Nevertheless, a variety of factors may limit attention to environmental justice, and raceand class-based environmental inequities in particular, including disagreements about their causes and remedies, and their historically low prioritization in environmental policy making (2,22).…”

“…Whereas a substantial body of literature has documented both environmental inequities and the political processes that generate and sustain them (2,18), few studies have examined public perceptions that might facilitate or impede efforts to address these inequities (20)(21)(22). We examine one such set of psychological processes-people's beliefs about the environmental concerns of others, particularly of vulnerable populations-which may have implications for efforts to mobilize public support for proenvironmental initiatives (2,12).…”

Environmentalism, norms, and identity

“…There is also a troubling effect of group identification. A small but growing body of evidence from the United States finds that those who believe that minorities have had undue advantage have lower support for environmental protection (14)(15)(16). They may be assuming that environmental protection is of most benefit to minorities and see this as part of a bundle of unwarranted benefits.…”

Other-regarding preferences and pro-environmental behaviour: An interdisciplinary review of experimental studies

“…Empirical studies from experimental economics, environmental and social psychology provide ample evidence for the positive link between other-regarding preferences and PEB (for overviews see Schultz and Zelezny, 1998;Schultz and Zelezny, 1999;Dietz et al, 2005). People with stronger other-regarding preferences show higher levels of pro-environmental intentions (Cheung et al, 2014); are more likely to engage in real environmental conservation activities (Karapetyan and d'Adda, 2014); are more willing to give up scarce resources for environmental protection (money - Dietz et al, 2018;time -Cameron et al, 1998) and animal welfare (Frey and Pirscher, 2018); perceive personal costs of proenvironmental programs as lower (Cameron et al, 1998); and show stronger support for proenvironmental policies (Drews and van den Bergh, 2016;Bechtel et al, 2017). These findings mostly come from correlational studies and thus do not provide evidence on the causal pathways or mechanisms of how other-regarding preferences enhance PEB.…”