Cross-Cultural Evidence for Spatial Bias in Beliefs About the Severity of Environmental Problems

By P. W. Schultz, T. Milfont, Randie C. Chance, Giuseppe Tronu, Sílvia Luís, Kaori Ando, Faiz Rasool, P. Roose, C. Ogunbode, J. Castro and 1 more. 2014

110 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Prior research has shown a tendency for environmental problems to be rated as more severe at the global level than at the local level. The present article reports reanalyses of a large cross-cultural data set (Study 1: k = 22, N = 3,277) and new cross-cultural data (Study 2: k = 8, N = 1,131) examining the prevalence of this spatial bias in the rated severity of environmental problems along with analyses of individual and country-level predictors of this bias. Results from multilevel modeling analyses showed that spatial bias was greater for happier and younger individuals and for those from smaller communities. We interpret these results as evidence for self-serving and “place-serving” biases in which the bias tempers the severity of environmental problems in one’s local area. Considering the large cross-cultural evidence, we argue that spatial bias is a plausible candidate of a psychological universal identified by research in environmental psychology.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df7c347d2cf9e3fc49f1116cf014f616cc0e7ced

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In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Perceptions of time in relation to climate change (2014, unknown): “…I am safer than others), for families and communities (i.e., we’re safer than other families and communities), and also for spatially based judgements (i.e., our local area is safer than are other areas), 57,58 for a range of issues including health risks resulting from environmental pollution.”
We are at risk, and so what? Place attachment, environmental risk perceptions and preventive coping behaviours (2015, background): “Thus, a person may tend to discount a problem if it is about a serious environmental issue (Schultz et al., 2014) or may not copewith the problem because of affective biases (Gifford et al.”
Place attachment and natural hazard risk: Research review and agenda (2016, background): “This spatial bias may arise, for example, by the local vs. global (Gifford et al., 2009) or the here vs. there (Hatfield & Job, 2001) comparison, functioning as a barrier preventing individuals from coping with local natural environment issues (Schultz et al., 2014).”