“Mother Nature” enhances connectedness to nature and pro-environmental behavior

By Ting Liu, Liuna Geng, Lijuan Ye, Kexin Zhou. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2019

112 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract “Mother Nature” is representative of the anthropomorphic women-nature association in mental imagery and metaphors; however, research on the mechanism underlying this association is limited. We examined the women-nature association via implicit and explicit measurements and explored how it affected people's environmental intentions and behaviors. Study 1 found that women and men agreed implicitly that women were more closely associated with nature than men through the Implicit Association Test. Study 2 examined discriminant validity of nature's femininity and masculinity role by anthropomorphism and questionnaire. Study 3 confirmed that anthropomorphizing nature as feminine induced a significantly stronger connectedness to nature and greater pro-environmental behavioral intention and behavior than did anthropomorphizing nature as masculine. Connectedness to nature partially mediated the anthropomorphic effect on pro-environmental behavior. This research provides empirical evidence for the women-nature association and bears practical implications for environmental protection advertising, education, and nature-based tourism.

Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df5e8e305e61cc4508011cd843164b2f5da961ea