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Lord (1994)
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Environmental Psychology – Recycling Behaviours
In this course, Professor Birgitta Gatersleben (University of Surrey) explores recycling behaviours and messaging. In the first lecture, we think about the design and findings of Lord’s 1994 study. In the second lecture, we think about types of persuasive communication in the context of environmental messaging. In the third lecture, we think about methods of behavioural change. Next, we think about social influence factors, including injunctive and descriptive norms. In the fifth and final lecture, we think about pro-environmental behaviours and how they differ from environmentally significant behaviours.
Lord (1994)
In this lecture, we think about Kenneth Lord’s 1994 paper investigating motivations for recycling behaviours, focusing in particular on: (i) the research-backed phenomenon that people are more likely to accept positively framed messaging; (ii) the influences considered, within Lord’s paper, of the source of the message being presented; (iii) the different attitude and belief changing processes, considered to be cognitive processes investigated in this study; (iv) the definition of a quasi-experimental design being a study wherein participants are not randomly allocated to the experimental conditions; (v) a key weakness of this study being its relatively small (140) participant number; (vi) key strengths of this study being the fact that it is a field study, as well as it having an objective measure of behaviour to record; (vii) Lord’s confirmed hypotheses that recycling messages will improve recycling behaviour, that negatively framed messages will be less effective, that information from a trusted source is most likely to be effective (but not by as much as had been predicted), and that behaviour change is most affected by persuasive communication from a personally relevant source; (viii) the theory of planned behaviour and the theory of reasoned action.
Hello. My name is bigger targets Labour.
00:00:06I work at the university of Sorry and I am a
00:00:09professor of environmental psychology where my research is looking at,
00:00:12um promoting programme,
00:00:16mental behaviour and the strategies and techniques that we use to do that,
00:00:18as well as people's engagement with natural environment and
00:00:22the build environment in order to study people,
00:00:25environment, interactions if you like.
00:00:28And today I'm going to talk about
00:00:30recycling and how to promote recycling and particularly referring to the
00:00:33paper that you will have read by Lord in 19,
00:00:37published in 1994.
00:00:41I believe, um which looked at a range of strategies to promote recycling behaviour.
00:00:43And I will talk.
00:00:51I have different modules that we're talking about,
00:00:53so I'll talk to summarise the paper and explain
00:00:55some of the things a little bit more detail
00:00:58and I'll then I'll talk a little bit more
00:00:59specifically about specific issues related to the paper.
00:01:02So social influence, uh, persuasion behaviour change.
00:01:05And also what do we mean by programme? Mental behaviour?
00:01:10Um,
00:01:13so I'll start now we're talking about the paper
00:01:14and summarising the key ideas behind the paper.
00:01:17So Lord is basically using cognitive
00:01:21psychology processes and strategies to try and
00:01:25understand how people can be persuaded to to engage with the recycling programme.
00:01:28Um,
00:01:35and the starting point is almost looking at
00:01:36how people can absorb or resist information.
00:01:39Uh, so if you present information to them in different forms, they might reject.
00:01:43People might reject information and sometimes and
00:01:48also sometimes they might accept the information that
00:01:51will actually change their attitudes and their
00:01:53beliefs and then result into behaviour change.
00:01:54Um,
00:01:57and they're looking at specifically at, as I mentioned, persuasion and then,
00:01:59particularly at positive and negative messages.
00:02:04And the framing of those messages and what they're proposing or suggesting
00:02:07is that negatively framed messages are more likely to be rejected,
00:02:11UH, then positively framed messages.
00:02:16And there's a lot of research and literature that has supported these ideas. So if we
00:02:18are presented with a negatively framed message, a fear appeal, if you like,
00:02:23and then that might be might reject that people don't want to accept.
00:02:29And it's almost an unconscious bias.
00:02:33People don't want to absorb negatively framed messages or information.
00:02:35They will reject it.
00:02:41They won't absorb it necessarily but positively framed messages.
00:02:42How much more likely to be absorbed, and I'll talk a bit more about that later.
00:02:45The other thing that they are looking at is the information source.
00:02:49So who presents the information and the influence of different sources
00:02:53of information and particularly they're
00:02:57looking at personal information sources.
00:02:59So if somebody a friend tells you to recycle, it will be different from, uh,
00:03:01if an advertising campaign tries to encourage you to
00:03:07recycling or if it is a public messages from,
00:03:10for instance, from a local authority or from government,
00:03:14and people are more likely.
00:03:17They propose that to accept messages
00:03:18from public information sources because those sources
00:03:21are more likely to be perceived as knowledgeable and as trustworthy again.
00:03:24I took a little bit more about that in detail in one of the other modules, Um,
00:03:29and they also one of the things that they also look at, which is quite interesting,
00:03:35is that the influence of messages on
00:03:38attitudes and belief,
00:03:41changes and behaviour changes and that they are not necessarily the same.
00:03:43Um so the cognitive processes that they look at in detail they
00:03:47influence whether people accept or absorb
00:03:54the information or process the information,
00:03:57um, processing information might share,
00:04:00resulting to changes in your perceptions and your beliefs
00:04:03and your accepting or not rejecting of the information.
00:04:06Um, but that might not necessarily change your behaviour.
00:04:09Or at least there were other processes at play that also affect whether you
00:04:14change your behaviour so they look at
00:04:18the influence of these information campaigns.
00:04:20These messages on belief changes on attitude
00:04:25changes and on behaviour changes separately.
00:04:29And so they present they present a quasi experimental design.
00:04:33It's called the quasi experimental design,
00:04:39because they don't randomly allocate people to the different conditions.
00:04:41Um, but people are specifically allocated to particular conditions,
00:04:47and that's mainly because, uh, one of the messages is from an acquaintance.
00:04:51So this is personally relevant information.
00:04:57So you'll get told about the positive or
00:04:59the negative aspects of recycling or not recycling,
00:05:02uh, by either public information source or by an advertisement or or by a friend.
00:05:05Um, And in order to make that work, they,
00:05:12the people who get given the information about the friend recently need to
00:05:15know the source of the information so they couldn't randomly allocate people.
00:05:20That's a quality experimental design.
00:05:24Um, and then they present a whole range of different hypotheses.
00:05:26Quite a few of them, Um,
00:05:31and they are related to the different aspects of the messages and
00:05:34related under to the cognitive processing of the information or behaviour change.
00:05:39Um,
00:05:44they allocate 20 people in each of the conditions to, uh in each of the conditions,
00:05:46So they have about 140 people in total, which is not a huge number of people.
00:05:53But the good thing about this study is that it's a field study,
00:05:56so it's actually done in reality.
00:05:59So they actually go out and give people this information. Uh, and then they measure
00:06:02at the end people's beliefs and people's attitudes,
00:06:08but also throughout the process at the start and at the end of the experiment,
00:06:11they actually have research students and assistance, um,
00:06:15measuring counting the number of bits of waste
00:06:19that have been put in the recycling bin.
00:06:23So there's an objective measure, their of people's behaviour,
00:06:25which is really quite good,
00:06:28because it doesn't always happen in a research
00:06:29project which often rely on self reported behaviour,
00:06:31uh, in line with their predictions.
00:06:35They first,
00:06:37they predict that all the messages are going
00:06:37to be more effective in changing people's beliefs.
00:06:39Their attitudes and their behaviour is compared to a control
00:06:43condition where people don't get any information at all.
00:06:46And that is confirmed the hypothesis and then the second hypothesis.
00:06:49They predict that
00:06:53the negatively framed messages are less likely to change attitudes and beliefs,
00:06:56and again that is confirmed so people are
00:07:01less likely to engage with negatively framed information.
00:07:04Then they also predict that the information that comes from a
00:07:08public trusted source is most likely to be effected effective,
00:07:13particularly when it's a negatively framed message.
00:07:19But actually that hypothesis is not completely confirmed.
00:07:22What they mostly find is that, yes, the information is effective. However,
00:07:27um, the advertisement is more effective than they anticipated.
00:07:33They anticipated that the negative advertisement
00:07:38would not be perceived as trustworthy.
00:07:42Actually,
00:07:45it has had a positive effect on people's belief or
00:07:45is not significantly different from the public engagement information.
00:07:48Finally, they also find that, uh,
00:07:56the behaviour change is most affected by persuasive
00:08:00communication messages from a personally relevant source.
00:08:06Uh, and again, that's in line with their prediction. So they are.
00:08:11They predicted,
00:08:15that information that comes from somebody you know
00:08:16is most likely to actually spur you on
00:08:19to change your behaviour.
00:08:22Um, and again, as I mentioned before,
00:08:25that's not necessarily the same as changing your your attitudes or your beliefs.
00:08:27So that final point and again I'll come back to that in
00:08:34a bit more detail is related to the theory of plant behaviour.
00:08:38So the theory of plant behaviour is one of the most influential theories really in,
00:08:42uh, in in social and environmental and also cognitive psychology.
00:08:46And it's suggests that behaviour is influenced
00:08:51by people's attitude towards a behaviour,
00:08:54but also their perceptions of norms.
00:08:57So what other people doing what other people think it's important
00:08:59to do in the paper Because it's quite an old people.
00:09:02They refer to the theory of reasoned action UH, a a newer version of that.
00:09:05That model is the theory of planned behaviour.
00:09:11The theory of read.
00:09:14The difference between those two theories is that the theory of
00:09:15planned behaviour has an additional factor added to the model,
00:09:18which is perceived behavioural control.
00:09:23So the extent to which you think it's easy or difficult to do the behaviour
00:09:25and the key thing about behind that theory is then that people
00:09:30will adopt a pro environmental behaviour or any other kind of behaviour,
00:09:35really, because they find it easy or difficult to do easy to do,
00:09:38ideally because they think it's a good thing to do.
00:09:43So they have a positive attitude towards the behaviour and because they think,
00:09:46believe that other people think it's a good thing to do.
00:09:51Uh,
00:09:55and so those three factors influence behaviour
00:09:56and then in line with their predictions,
00:09:58they find that the message that comes from
00:10:00personally relevant source is indeed the one,
00:10:04um, that has the most influence on behaviour change.
00:10:06Although all of them do have an effect on behaviour change in total.
00:10:10Okay, so that's this is my summary of the paper,
00:10:15and I will talk a bit more about each of those factors in a little bit more details.
00:10:17So, um, I will, um, yeah, so you're in the other modules
00:10:22
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Gatersleben, B. (2022, May 31). Environmental Psychology – Recycling Behaviours - Lord (1994) [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/environmental-psychology-recycling-behaviours
MLA style
Gatersleben, B. "Environmental Psychology – Recycling Behaviours – Lord (1994)." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 31 May 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/environmental-psychology-recycling-behaviours