Understanding behavior to understand behavior change: a literature review

By Joe Heimlich, N. Ardoin. 2008

684 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One view of environmental education suggests that its goal is to ‘develop a world population that … has the knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivations and commitment to work individually and collectively towards solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones’ (UNESCO‐UNEP 1976). Embedded within this charge is the teaching of skills and motivations to implement skills, where a skill refers to performance of an act acquired through extended practice and training (Ericsson and Oliver 1995). However, it is often difficult to articulate clearly what skills we teach in conservation education and environmental education focusing on behavior change or influence. It can be equally challenging to describe the behaviors we are ultimately seeking, identified in the Tbilisi Declaration as ‘new patterns of behavior’ (UNESCO 1978). At a basic level, it is important to explore the grounding for teaching toward behavior – often referred to as behavior change – that supports the work of the field. This literature review attempts to provide a foundation for behavior‐related discussions in environmental and conservation education. A number of the behavior theories, concepts and models discussed in this review have been explored extensively elsewhere; therefore, this review is not exhaustive, but rather is intended to be broadly representative of the literature.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/826b63781e119726f2d1d546a557c5928bb1d06c

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Citations in the corpus

Environmental education and K-12 student outcomes: A review and analysis of research (2018, background): “Similarly, measuring changes in behaviors is notoriously difficult given the complexity of environmental behavior (Heimlich & Ardoin, 2008; Hollweg et al., 2011) and challenges related to parsing intentions versus actual behaviors (Fu, Peterson, Kannan, Shavelson, & Kurpius, 2015).”
Participant Outcomes of Biodiversity Citizen Science Projects: A Systematic Literature Review (2019, neutral): “While there is little consensus on the variables that influence behavior change and on the extent to which they affect behavior, researchers agree that a variety of factors can determine environmental behavior, such as knowledge, attitudes, skills, self-efficacy, emotions, and motivation [66,73].”
Environmental learning in online social networks: adopting environmentally responsible behaviors (2011, background): “For instance, Heimlich and Ardoin (2008) compiled an extensive review of the behavior and behavior change literature, wherein they detail perspectives from several branches of social science. They present behavior as a series of skills which are learned well enough to become habits that become embed”
Scientific Outreach: Toward Effective Public Engagement with Biological Science (2014, background): “In fact, even an intention to act is a poor empirical predictor of behavior, which depends instead on a complicated network of interacting factors, including social context, self-confidence, and emotion (Ajzen 1991, Heimlich and Ardoin 2008).”
Environmental Education for Behaviour Change: Which actions should be targeted? (2012, background): “…to take action and the concern about the consequences of global warming may each be a reflection of a ‘constellation’ of underlying attitudes (Heimlich & Ardoin, 2008), which includes students’ perception of themselves as being pro-environmental; almost half of the students in the present…”
On the Determinants of Pro-Environmental Behavior: A Literature Review and Guide for the Empirical Economist (2019, background): “…more recently has been investigated by researchers in the field of environmental psychology since the 1960s (for reviews, see, e.g. Hines et al., 1987; Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002; Bamberg and Möser, 2007; Heimlich and Ardoin, 2008; Steg and Vlek, 2009; Klöckner, 2013; Gifford and Nilsson, 2014).”
Spillover effects in environmental behaviors, across time and context: a review and research agenda (2017, background): “For environmental educators it is important to ‘understanding behavior to understand behavioral change’ (Heimlich and Ardoin 2008), therefore educators should to be aware of the potentiality and risks of spillover effects.”
A Competence Model for Environmental Education (2014, background): “This motivational indeterminacy can be overcome by considering— what Heimlich and Ardoin (2008) call individual constellations of behaviors— a person’s general ecological pattern of behavior (Kaiser, Byrka, & Hartig, 2010).”
Middle and high school students’ conceptions of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies (2015, background): “One’s behaviors are influenced by a variety of psychological, cognitive, social, and cultural factors (Ajzen and Fishbein 2005; Heimlich and Ardoin 2008; Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002).”
The influence of the family, the school, and the group on the environmental attitudes of European students (2017, background): “Although the link between attitudes and behaviours has sometimes been questioned in the literature (Heimlich and Ardoin 2008), numerous authors claim that environmental attitudes are powerful predictors of ecological behaviours (Kaiser, Oerke, and Bogner 2007; Kaiser, Wölfing, and Fuhrer 1999;…”
Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability (2020, background): “Rather, education that leads to sustainable development and enduring change in knowledge, skills, attitudes and/or values builds from existing understandings, fosters social learning and embraces a ‘whole person’ approach (Heimlich & Ardoin, 2008; Wals, 2007).”