Imagining a sustainable world: Measuring cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2020.101523Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We present a new measure of access to environmental cognitive alternatives (ECAS).

  • The ECAS predicts pro-environmental activist identification.

  • The ECAS predicts pro-environmental collective action.

Abstract

We build on social identity models of environmental collective action by developing the Environmental Cognitive Alternatives Scale (ECAS), which measures the ability to imagine what a sustainable relationship between humans and the rest of nature might look like. In Study 1 (N = 386), we developed the initial scale, and found evidence for its construct validity. The ECAS was associated with other relevant social identity theory variables—perceived (il)legitimacy and (in)stability of the current environmental status quo and engagement in environmental collective action, as well as with other environmental variables including pro-environmental consumer behavior and beliefs about anthropogenic climate change. In Study 2 (N = 393), we confirmed the factor structure of the ECAS, found additional evidence for its construct validity, and found that it was a strong predictor of environmental activist identification, explaining variance beyond extensive control variables including identification with nature, perceived (in)stability and (il)legitimacy, and beliefs about anthropogenic climate change. It also explained additional variance in willingness to engage in environmental collective action behavior beyond even environmental activist identification. Our results suggest that the ability to imagine cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo might have important implications for whether people engage in pro-environmental collective action to mitigate climate-change and other environmental problems.

Introduction

The 2018 special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018) details the extreme risks of not strengthening efforts to mitigate anthropogenic global warming. According to the report, limiting global warming to 1.5 °C would require “transformative system change” (p. 315). Governments across the globe have been slow to enact sensible climate policy, in part because powerful vested interests have successfully blocked policy change and have encouraged climate change denial through disinformation campaigns (Carroll, 2020; Klein, 2014; Magdoff & Foster, 2011). Therefore, we assume that successful climate change mitigation will require collective action—social protest and social movements to change the system in order to protect the environment (Bamberg, Rees, & Schulte, 2018).

Social psychologists have begun to apply the wealth of theorizing and evidence from intergroup relations to understand the predictors of pro-environmental collective action (Bamberg et al., 2018; Fielding & Hornsey, 2016; Fritsche et al., 2018). In this paper, we consider a potentially important predictor of pro-environmental collective action that has been overlooked in the literatures on environmental collective action and collective action more generally—the ability to imagine an alternative world characterized by more sustainable relations between humans and the rest of nature. We draw on Social Identity Theory (SIT; Tajfel & Turner, 1979) in our conceptualization of the ability to imagine cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo and its relationship with pro-environmental collective action. Tajfel and Turner described access to cognitive alternatives to the status quo as the ability to imagine a different relationship between groups than the relationship at present. Specifically, Tajfel and Turner theorized that the ability to imagine alternative social relations between groups is an important precondition of taking collective action to create social change. We consider the possibility that people are more likely to work to create a more sustainable world the more easily they can imagine what that sustainable world would be like. To begin addressing this question, we developed and validated a measure of the ability to imagine cognitive alternatives to the present status relations between humans and the rest of the natural world. Subsequently, we examined the ability of this measure to predict identification with environmental activists and willingness to engage in environmental collective action, such as attending protests in support of environmental protection or donating money to environmental organizations that support the protection of the environment.

Social Identity Theory (SIT) recognizes that people can define themselves in collective terms, and when they do, they tend to engage in ingroup protective behaviors (Brewer, 1999; Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Wright, 2015; Yzerbyt & Demoulin, 2010). Thus, SIT explains collective action as resulting from collective identification with a group whose identity and interests are served by that action (van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008). For example, just as identification with human categories tends to predict action on behalf of those categories, identifying with the category “nature” predicts engagement in pro-environmental behavior (Mackay & Schmitt, 2019; Mayer & Frantz, 2004; Nisbett, Zolenski, & Murphy, 2009). When it comes to collective action, however, politicized identities—identification with a group actively working for social change—tend to be stronger and more proximal predictors than identification with a larger social category (Simon et al., 1998; Simon & Klandermans, 2001; van Zomeren, Spears, & Leach, 2008). Similarly, identification with environmental activists or an environmental organization predicts environmental activism (Bamberg, Rees, & Seebauer, 2015; Brunsting & Postmes, 2002; Dono, Webb, & Richardson, 2010; Fielding, McDonald, & Louis, 2008), and is a more proximal predictor than identification with nature (Schmitt, Mackay, Droogendyk, & Payne, 2019).

In SIT, collective identity and collective behavior also depend on subjective understandings of the social structure and status relations between groups (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). In part, SIT suggests that individuals are more likely to engage in collective action when the status relations are perceived as “insecure”—as illegitimate and unstable (Reicher & Haslam, 2006; Tajfel & Turner, 1979). In other words, people will act to create social change for the benefit of an ingroup when they believe that such change would be more legitimate than the status quo and when it appears possible to create the desired change (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Judgments of instability in the social system predict collective attempts at social change (Ellemers, Van Knippenberg, & Wilke, 1990) and perceptions of illegitimacy of the unequal relations between groups have been found to predict collective action intentions (Tee, Ramis, Fernandez, & Paulsen, 2017). Similarly, in the environmental context, perceptions of legitimacy are related to pro-environmental attitudes and behavior. Believing it is illegitimate for humans to rule over the rest of nature is related to more pro-environmental behavior (Maxwell-Smith, Conway, Wright, & Olson, 2018), and perceiving illegitimacy in who benefits from greenhouse gas emissions and who is most vulnerable to the negative effects of climate change predicts willingness to act to mitigate climate change (Kals and Russell, 2001). More generally, people may be more likely to work collectively for pro-environmental social change when they perceive insecurity in the status relations between humans and the rest of nature, and in the relations between groups of people trying to protect the environment and groups with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Although the insecurity of group relations has been examined almost entirely in terms of perceptions of stability and legitimacy, Reicher and Haslam (2006) argue that insecurity “is characterized by the fact that individuals are aware of cognitive alternatives to the status quo and hence can envisage specific ways in which it could be changed” (Reicher & Haslam, 2006, p. 5). The ability to imagine cognitive alternatives is the ability to conceive of how the status quo could be different, not whether it will or should be different. That is, in order to work toward social change, people need to have some conception about what that change will look like. Simply believing that change could happen (i.e., the status quo is unstable) or that change should happen (i.e., the status quo is illegitimate) does not necessarily mean that individuals are able to imagine what change will look like (i.e., cognitive alternatives), and thus be able to work toward that specific change.

From the perspective of a low-status, disadvantaged group, cognitive alternatives reflect an awareness of possible altered futures that improve upon the existing social reality (Abrams & Hogg, 1990; Turner & Brown, 1978), entailing improved status, opportunities, and resources for the ingroup (Iyer, Zhang, Jetten, Hao, & Cui, 2017; Zhang, Jetten, Iyer, & Cui, 2013). For example, Tajfel and Turner (1979) argued that the ability of Black Americans to imagine a world in which they had equal status as Whites resulted in Black Nationalism and a direct confrontation with the unequal status of White people and Black people in the United States. The power of cognitive alternatives to catalyze collective efforts at social change was demonstrated in the BBC prison study, in which experimenters created a mock prison with participants assigned to be prisoners or guards (Reicher & Haslam, 2006). At one point, the experimenters introduced a new prisoner who had a background in trade union organizing. As the experimenters intended, the new prisoner quickly developed cognitive alternatives to the status quo (i.e. a proposed vision of how the relations between prisoners and guards could be made more equal) and shared these ideas with other prisoners. The subsequent actions of the prisoners led to a new formal process for negotiation and the eventual breakdown of the prisoner-guard dichotomy, which was replaced by a “commune” where former prisoners and guards were now members of the same group. Although other forms of resistance preceded the introduction of cognitive alternatives into the experimental context, it was the shared vision for how social relations could be restructured that led to collective, coordinated efforts to make that vision a reality.

Traditionally, the concept of “cognitive alternatives to the status quo” has been applied to low-status, disadvantaged groups who stood to gain by improving their status vis-à-vis a more powerful outgroup. However, cognitive alternatives are also relevant to when higher status groups will support social change, and even relinquish their power. In the BBC prison study, being able to imagine cognitive alternatives to the prisoner-guard hierarchy not only motivated the prisoners to resist their low status, but also motivated the guards to agree to give up their high status. When a high status group is tainted by illegitimacy, high status group members might be willing to relinquish their higher status if cognitive alternatives present a set of social relations in which high status group members can shed or transform their current identity in favor of one that is subjectively more positive (Cinnirella, 1998; Reicher & Haslam, 2006).

In the environmental context, cognitive alternatives can take several forms and involve multiple intergroup relations. At the most basic level, cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo involve a change in the status relations between humans and the rest of nature, with humans living in harmony with the rest of nature, rather than attempting to dominate nature. In this sense, humans are the more dominant group, and thus a more sustainable and harmonious relationship with the rest of nature would involve a loss of status. However, in the current environmental context, the long-term viability of humanity is highly uncertain, and the idea that humans should dominate nature is increasingly called into question. Therefore, like the guards in the BBC prison study, cognitive alternatives to an illegitimate system can make a loss of status more desirable. Attempting to maintain or achieve human dominance over nature might be seen as less desirable than the prospect of relating to nature as a community to which we belong.

Environmental cognitive alternatives might include a human population that attempts to integrate with nature rather than trying to dominate it. In the context of climate change, cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo would likely include technological changes, such as imagining a world without fossil fuels, powered by solar and wind energy. Of course, humans are not a unified category, and changes in humans’ relationship to the rest of nature would necessarily involve changes in relationships between groups of humans. How humans relate to the rest of nature depends on myriad intergroup relations between industry, capital and government, between citizens and government, between corporations and citizens, between elite groups and the majority of people on the planet, and between activist groups that challenge fossil fuel infrastructure projects and the businesses and governments that support those projects. Thus, it seems likely that cognitive alternatives to the environmental status quo will also include cognitive alternatives to status relations between human categories, such as an increase in the power of groups who want to protect the environment vis-à-vis those who want to maintain the status quo. In this sense, environmental cognitive alternatives are more like how cognitive alternatives have typically been conceptualized–as changes that involve reducing the status and power of an outgroup and leading to direct competition with that outgroup.

Cognitive alternatives to the status quo are important within SIT (Abrams & Hogg, 1990; Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Turner & Brown, 1978), have some evidentiary support in generating collective action in other contexts (Reicher & Haslam, 2006) and appear to be a logical precursor to collective action. However, no studies have measured cognitive alternatives in the context of environmental activism. Indeed, in other intergroup contexts as well, access to cognitive alternatives has been measured only rarely (Wright, 2009), and when it has been measured, researchers used ad hoc measures with unknown reliability or validity (Zhang et al., 2013). Thus, we aimed to develop a scale to measure the ability to imagine cognitive alternatives to the status relations between humans and the rest of the natural world and to use this scale to examine whether ability to imagine cognitive alternatives correlates with environmental collective action.

Following a common approach to scale construction (DeVellis, 2017; Hinkin, 1998), we developed an initial item pool that included plausible ways that society could alter the status quo between humans and the rest of nature and one's ability to imagine these alternatives (e.g., "I can easily imagine a world in which we supply all of our energy needs without harming the natural world"). Although it is certainly possible to imagine cognitive alternatives that are worse than the status quo (e.g., a dystopian future), like Tajfel and Turner (1979) we focus on people's ability to perceive subjectively positive cognitive alternatives as it is these kinds of cognitive alternatives that have traditionally been the focus as precursors to collective action (Abrams & Hogg, 1990; Iyer et al., 2017; Turner & Brown, 1978; Zhang et al., 2013). We developed a broad initial item pool that would capture differences in how well people can imagine a more sustainable relationship between humans and the rest of nature or a more equitable relation between human groups relevant to this more sustainable relation (e.g., "I can easily imagine a system in which the government reflects the interests of the natural environment rather than the interests of the wealthy”). We ensured our items were relevant to a variety of different alternatives that people could imagine, rather than limited to a particular content domain. We then examined the factor structure of the items, reduced the number of items, examined the scale's reliability and validity, confirmed the factor structure of the scale in an independent sample, and demonstrated the use of the scale in predicting meaningful variance in important collective outcome variables.

In accordance with SIT, we expected that being able to imagine cognitive alternatives to the status quo would be positively associated with the intention to engage in pro-environmental collective action. Furthermore, we expected that perceiving cognitive alternatives to the status quo between humans and the rest of nature would be negatively related to perceptions of legitimacy and stability. The ability to imagine cognitive alternatives could conceivably require knowledge about the current state of the environment and knowledge about ways of improving that current state. Thus, environmental knowledge should also be associated with the ability to imagine cognitive alternatives. Other convergent constructs include pro-environmental consumer behaviors, and beliefs that anthropogenic climate change is occurring and has negative consequences. Recognizing the role of humans in the destruction of nature could presumably promote thinking about alternative ways of doing things that are better for the planet. In effect, recognizing a problem should be associated with imagining solutions. We also tested for convergent validity by asking participants to generate cognitive alternatives in an open-ended format and then examining whether proxy variables created from these open-ended responses are positively associated with our newly generated closed-ended scale of the ability to imagine cognitive alternatives.

Section snippets

Study 1

In study 1 we began the scale construction process by developing an initial item pool, examining the factor structure of this item pool, reducing the number of items, and examining the reliability and validity of the retained items. All methods, analyses, and hypotheses reported reflect what we pre-registered.1

Results

Prior to conducting analyses, we screened the open-ended responses for nonsensical responding (e.g., a single random word or random digit inserted into each textbox). This can be an indicator of a bot. We removed 16 respondents for this reason and an additional four respondents who failed the attention check. The final sample for analysis was 386, including 217 men, 167 women, and 2 participants who did not report their gender. The majority of participants identified as “White or Caucasian”

Discussion

In Study 1 we developed a scale measuring the extent to which individuals can imagine cognitive alternatives to the current status relations between humans and the rest of nature. We provided preliminary evidence of the scale's single-factor structure, internal consistency, convergent validity with an open-ended cognitive alternatives task, and convergent and discriminant validity from conceptually similar constructs in the social identity framework. Two convergent validity predictions were not

Study 2

In Study 2 we first attempted to confirm the factor structure of the ECAS in an independent sample. Then we further examined its psychometric properties and its predictive validity in explaining environmental activist identification and willingness to engage in environmental activist behavior. Environmental activist identification refers to a politicized identity and politicized identities are strong predictors of social change behavior (Schmitt et al., 2019). There is a strong correlation

General discussion

Researchers have begun to apply Social Identity Theory (SIT) to explain collective action in the environmental context (Bamberg et al., 2015; Dono et al., 2010; Fielding & Hornsey, 2016; Schmitt et al., 2019). However, one of the most important theoretical variables within SIT for explaining when people engage in attempts at social change—access to cognitive alternatives to the status quo—has not received much attention in research on environmental activism or in collective action research more

Conclusion

We have provided good evidence for the reliability and validity of the ECAS—a new scale measuring the ability to imagine cognitive alternatives to the status relations between humans and the rest of nature. This scale offers the possibility of improving our understanding of the causes of environmental activist behavior. It also offers the possibility of testing additional predictions derived from SIT within environmental psychology and provides an example for others who may be interested in

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Joshua D. Wright: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Project administration. Michael T. Schmitt: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Resources, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Caroline M.L. Mackay: Writing - review & editing. Scott D. Neufeld: Writing - review & editing.

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    This research was supported through a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant to the second author.

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