Measuring adolescents' level of interest in nature: a promising psychological factor facilitating nature protection.

Studies indicate that young people are more prepared to engage in pro-environmental behavior if they are interested in nature and recognize it as worthy of protection. However, a reliable instrument to measure adolescents' interest in nature is still lacking. Therefore, we developed a new metric, the Scale of Interest in Nature (SIN). It consists of 18 items, is based on Item-Response-Theory and was validated using the known group approach (N = 351 adolescents). Results indicate that adolescents' interest in nature correlates positively with their connection with nature, their intention to preserve nature and engagement in pro-environmental activities in their free time. Bivariate Pearson correlations between the SIN and the Connectedness to Nature Scale (INS), as well as the Environmental Values model (2-MEV) demonstrated the scale's construct validity. Hence, the SIN scale provides an economical way to measure adolescents' interest in nature in research contexts or environmental and sustainability education settings.

Breaking the chain with individual gain? Investigating the moral intensity of COVID-19 digital contact tracing.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, contact tracing apps such as the German Corona-Warning-App (CWA) were introduced to facilitate contact tracing of infected individuals with the aim of breaking chains of infection. Therefore, using a contact tracing app is beneficial to society as a whole. Even though this is a good cause, the rather reluctant use of the CWA in the beginning indicated that the pains (e.g., privacy concerns) obviously outweighed the gains (helping others) at the level of the individual user. Thus, in order to identify what lies behind the gain of this app and how it can be promoted, we were interested in the individual's moral perspective (helping others) on the app. We expected a positive relation between CWA download and moral intensity derived from (i) the magnitude or seriousness of consequences, (ii) social norms about app use, (iii) the individual proximity to COVID-19 cases, and (iv) the probability of the app's positive effect. Using a heterogeneous German sample of N = 1,454, we found a strong influence of moral intensity on app download. Furthermore, a manipulation of moral intensity among non-users led to a higher number of downloads in a follow-up study (N = 662) as compared to the population. Our results show possibilities to enhance the adoption of contact tracing apps and potentially other apps for the common good in the population.

Social norms and webcam use in online meetings.

Face-to-face meetings are often preferred over other forms of communication because meeting in person provides the "richest" way to communicate. Face-to-face meetings are so rich because many ways of communicating (spoken language and nonverbal cues) are available to support mutual understanding. With the progress of digitization and driven by the need to reduce personal contact during the global pandemic, many face-to-face work meetings have been shifted to videoconferences. With webcams turned on, video calls come closest to the richness of face-to-face meetings. However, webcam use often remains voluntary, and some participants choose not to turn their cameras on. In order to find ways to support webcam use-when desired-we analyzed how social norms in groups affect the decision to activate a webcam in a specific meeting. Based on an online survey with N = 333 participants, we found that social norms are related to an individual's decision to turn on the webcam, even when controlling for group size. If the number of participants with activated webcams in a university meeting increased by 25%, it was 5.92 times more likely that an individual decided to turn their webcam on, too. Furthermore, 81.84% of respondents indicated they would turn on their webcam if participants in a meeting were explicitly asked to do so. The results demonstrate a strong relation between social norms and the decision to activate a webcam in online meetings. They build a basis for enhancing webcam use and enable a greater richness of communication in online meetings.

Childhood Origins of Young Adult Environmental Behavior.

Prospective, longitudinal analyses revealed that over a 12-year period from ages 6 to 18, individuals who grew up with mothers with more proenvironmental attitudes engaged in more proenvironmental behavior as young adults. A similar marginal association was uncovered between mothers' proenvironmental behaviors and the proenvironmental behavior of their young adult offspring. Maternal educational attainment, but not political ideology, was also associated with more proenvironmental behavior as children matured. Moreover, childhood time spent outdoors was positively associated with increased environmentally responsible behavior in young adulthood. Interestingly, one's own childhood proenvironmental behavior and attitude, at least as assessed at age 6, bear little on one's eventual proenvironmental behavior as a young adult. Finally, among this set of childhood factors, maternal education and childhood time spent outdoors were independent predictors of positive changes in environmental behavior from early childhood to young adulthood.

The dominance of introspective measures and what this implies: The example of environmental attitude.

The behavioral sciences, including most of psychology, seek to explain and predict behavior with the help of theories and models that involve concepts (e.g., attitudes) that are subsequently translated into measures. Currently, some subdisciplines such as social psychology focus almost exclusively on measures that demand reflection or even introspection when administered to persons. We argue that such a focus hinders progress in explaining behavior. One major reason is that such an exclusive focus on reflections results in common method bias, which then produces spurious relations, or in other words, low discriminant validity. Without the valid measurement of theoretical concepts, theoretical assumptions cannot be tested, and hence, theory development will be hampered. We argue that the use of a greater variety of methods would reduce these problems and would in turn foster theory building. Using a representative sample of N = 472 participants (age: M = 51.0, SD = 17.7; 54% female), we compared the validity of a classical introspective attitude measure (i.e., the New Ecological Paradigm) with that of an alternative attitude measure (i.e., the General Ecological Behavior scale). The latter measure, which was based on self-reported behavior, showed substantially better validity that we argue could aid theory development.

Mindfully Green and Healthy: An Indirect Path from Mindfulness to Ecological Behavior.

This paper examines the nature of the link between mindfulness and ecological behavior. Based on the notion that mindfulness incorporates heightened awareness of bodily sensations, we suggest an indirect path from mindfulness to ecological behavior that is mediated through individual health behavior, such as improved nutrition and increased exercise. This indirect path is corroborated with two online studies (n = 147/n = 239) where mindfulness, personal health behavior and ecological behavior were assessed. We conclude that increased mindful awareness of momentary experience indeed favors more healthy lifestyles, which in turn relate to increased ecological behavior beyond personal health benefits. The findings support an agreeableness of personal and planetary health behavior and open up a path for environmental educational interventions based on mindfulness practices and personal health gains.

Attitudes and defaults save lives and protect the environment jointly and compensatorily: understanding the behavioral efficacy of nudges and other structural interventions.

A better understanding of when and why nudges (e.g., defaults, visibility or accessibility alterations) and other structural behavior-change measures work or fail can help avoid subsequent surprises such as unexpected political opposition. In this paper, we challenge the unilateral focus on structural interventions-which seemingly control people's behavioral decisions-as such a focus ignores the flipside-namely, attitudes or, as they are called in economics, preferences. We argue for a conceptual understanding of individual behavior that views personal attitudes and behavioral costs as its two separate compensatorily effective determinants. This classical understanding was reintroduced into attitude research as the Campbell paradigm. In the logic of the Campbell paradigm, a person's attitude becomes obvious in the face of the behavioral costs the person surmounts. Technically, individual attitudes reveal themselves in a set of cost-dependent transitively ordered performances. Behavioral costs in turn reflect the structural boundary conditions that are relevant as obstructive and/or supportive environmental forces that generically affect a specific behavior. So far, our research on people's attitudes toward environmental protection has demonstrated that the Campbell paradigm-and thus its conceptual account of individual behavior-holds true for approximately 95% of the people in a given society.