A cross-cultural comparison in decision-making model concerning environment

Congyu Lin, Peking University

 

Introduction

Ecological crisis has become a currently major issue that we have to deal with in the modern world. It is not an issue of whether we should take actions, but of how soon and how effective we are to take actions so as to prevent our environment from worsening. Not only developing rapidly, it is also global. We are living on the one same planet, and the pollution in one district can easily get transferred to another with the help of tide, wind, or water cycle. So every human being, no matter where he or she comes from, no matter what living condition he or she is involved for the time being, should take up the responsibility to take good care of the environment.

Although as we can see the environmental protection is a general issue for all human beings, to take actual actions is still an individual option. In fact, environment should be considered as a certain milieu where a human being settles. And it can only be considered as the environment if one is endorsed in it, establishing connection with it by taking up daily activities. Consequently, one’s environment is always restricted to a limited region, maybe as small as a farm, a neighbourhood, or a campus. No one can take the whole planet as habitation. This fact makes environmental protection, when comes to taking action, a more regional or even personal problem rather than a global and general one.

This is why we have to introduce decision-making into environmental protection. The subject of a decision-making process should be a subject living in a certain milieu. And what a decision-maker takes into consideration is always limited factors from limited perspectives, while environmental protection remains a general public issue. So questions are put forward naturally: how to find a balance? What defines a better decision? Is there a standard suit for all human beings? If there is, then what is it? if there is not, then what causes the difference?

In this essay, I will first discuss what influences people’s decision-making process based on Norm Activation Model (NAM). I refer to several studies that have addressed this problem before (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002; Han, 2014; Park, 2018). Then secondly I will specifically focus on environmental concerns that should be involved in the NAM decision-making process. Thirdly I will analyse this problem from a cross-cultural perspective, explicating the difference between the eastern and the western people when they make decisions for environmental issues.

With all these efforts, I aim to illustrate that culture can to a great extent influence people’s thinking, and thus a divergence in taking actions when facing with ecological crisis is inevitable. However, this cultural conflict may even serve as a positive contributor to global environmental protection.

 

1. Norm Activation Model

Norm Activation Model is proposed and developed in the context of altruism behaviour (Schwarz, 1977). According to Schwarz, the NAM consists of three antecedents to predict pro-social decision-making, namely awareness of consequences, ascription of responsibility, and personal norm.

Awareness of consequences is the first thing that comes to the subject’s mind when making decision, according to this model. The individual would first be aware of the harmful consequences or outcomes for others or other things one values when not conducting a specific action pro-socially or pro-environmentally in our case. How worse the situation would get? Can I afford such cost?

Ascription of responsibility refers to feelings of responsibility for the negative consequences of not acting pro-socially. Some believe that the ascription of responsibility is partially associated with the awareness of consequences. They take the model as claiming that the more the individuals are aware of the negative consequences of environmental problems, the more responsible they become for alleviating adverse consequences and morally obligated to adopt pro-environmental behaviors (Steg, Dreijerink, & Abrahamse, 2005).

The third aspect is personal norm. It indicates moral obligation to perform or refrain from specific actions. In fact, it is developed from the previous two beliefs and could direct an individual’s behaviour in altruism situation.

It should be mentioned here that there could be two different interpretations of the NAM, differing in the view of how personal norm is shaped by the other two criterions (Steg & De Groot, 2010). One interpretation believes that the shaping process is like a single-way sequence: consequence awareness affects the ascription of responsibility, and then the ascription influences the personal norm, which sequentially directs the pro-social or pro-environmental intention and behaviour. The optional interpretation suggests that it is the consequence awareness and the ascription of responsibility that together shape the personal norm, which then directly influence the decision-maker’s behaviour.

And in this essay, I will follow the first interpretation, the sequential one. Because firstly, there has been some experimental evidence in favour of it (Onwezen et al, 2013). Secondly, in a conceptual view, I think awareness of consequence is more like an estimation of the objective condition, which doesn’t necessarily involve value judgment. Individuals may simply infer from the current situation and past experience to tell what the consequence would be. While to evaluate the consequence immediately requires a subjective perspective and requires the consciousness of the relation between the subject and the objective events. This would lead to a feeling of responsibility. So conceptually speaking, it is reasonable that responsibility is established following thoughts of the consequence.

 

2. what is environmental decision making

In the introduction part, I have already made the claim that we should consider the environment as a milieu where we can find our daily activities dwell in. So an environment can be described as a group of living and non-living things that surround a subject, affect the subject, and also get affected by the subject. Human beings are in continuous interaction with their environment. And the interaction has many dimensions: physical, chemical, biological, psychological, economic, and many others. All these dimensions are not temporal, but shall preserve in time. We may be currently affected by our past decisions. And what we decide to do now may affect our future generations.

With this definition of environment and its interaction with us, we can understand why we should take environmental decision making as an important topic. Every decision we make leads to actions. And since we take the environment as a place where we live and act, our actions might influence the environment no matter we intend to or not. In other words, there are no actions if there are no alteration in the environment surrounding us. With this interpretation, to take environment into consideration when making decision is not only environment-oriented option which we have the right to reject, but also has an action-oriented aspect which we cannot avoid. It will make our actions more rational.

If we accept such concept, we will find that our relation with the environment is not one between a possessor and his possession. We do not control the environment. We merely interact with it. No action is independent from the environment, causing no alteration. Neither can an action be 100% environmental, setting aside personal concern.

However, this is not to claim that every decision we make is within our discussion scope. The environmental discussion that we would like to discuss should take environment as its object. When some decisions are made, we would explicitly be aware of the consequence caused by our actions on the environment: whether throwing the cigarette end away would cause a forest fire, whether walk to school instead of driving would reduce carbon emissions, whether recycling old clothes is necessary for a lower-carbon life style? These decisions concern subject’s conscious influence on his or her surroundings, while they are also issues that have worldwide environmental dimensions. Also, under these circumstances, subjects have clear and definite options to pick, and they can evaluate the consequences aroused by their actions.

 

3. applying the model

By far we have introduced a decision-making model, NAM. We have also clarified what kind of environmental issues we would like to discuss. Now it is time to put the model into use. Let’s go step by step with the sequential interpretation of the model. And to make it easier to understand, let’s conceive a certain situation: a tourist making environmental decision.

In fact, pro-environmental decision-making process of travellers has been discussed in a few articles that I find interesting (Park et al, 2018; Han, 2015; Kiatkawsin & Han, 2017; Lee et al, 2017). This topic draws so much attention because of, as far as I am concerned, the special status of the travellers. They are a group of people who enter a new environment only during a short period. They still keep their origin way of living in their familiar milieu. So in these conditions, we could notice a conflict between the traveller’s old concept and the new environment he or she deals with. Thus there would be new problems popping up and more decisions to make.

First, what kind of “consequences” should a traveller consider when he or she decides to take a trip? In most cases, people enjoy travelling to places that are little disturbed by human civilization, because they always want to get closer to the nature. So it should be seriously considered whether the ecological balance of a nature reserve or a primeval forest would be easily broken due to human’s activity. Another consequence has things to do with the carbon emission. Travellers should consider the energy consumed during the trip, such as the airplane fuel, the disposable tooth brush in the hotel and so on.

Second, will the travellers feel personally responsible for the consequences they caused? Or will they think it is the whole tourism that should take the blame? Or do they think comparing to travelling there are other industries that need more environmental revolution? For some people, they would consider tourism having far less negative impact on the environment than industry and human’s daily activity. So even if they know the plane they take would cost huge amount of fuel (for example, it would assume about 160-170 tons of fuel in one flight from China to USA), they would still consider themselves causing little burden for the environment. Furthermore, even if they think it is a huge pollution that a long journey causes, they may still insist that one tourist can do nothing about it: with or without this passenger, the plane is to take off anyway. In this condition, they would still feel little responsibility on their shoulders. So all these hierarchies of analysis can affect one’s ascription of responsibility. And if a questionnaire is used in a psychological research, these should all be taken into measurement.

As the sequence goes further, more dimensions emerge within comprehension and decision-making process becomes more complex. What makes up the personal norm? In fact, as for this question, different essays show various attitudes when designing the experiments.

For example, Park (2018) and his colleagues divide personal norm into three sup-parts: 1) social norm: do you think others would expect you to be an eco-friendly tourist? 2) personal perceived behavioural control: do you consider it as an obligation for you to protect the environment of the tourist destination? 3) pro-environmental behavioural intention: are you willing to be eco-friendly, say, will you stay in a green hotel where disposable tooth brush will not appear in the guest room?

And in Han’s research (Han, 2014), it is added that anticipated feelings of pride and guilt should also be taken into consideration because an anticipated feeling of pride motivates compliance with the personal norm, an anticipated feeling of guilt stimulates individuals to evade breaking the personal norm. Correspondingly, the subjects should evaluate their feelings such as in the following conditions: how proud you would be if you get a green badge for booking an eco-friendly hotel? How guilty you would be if you are told that the species of wild birds in the forest park you frequently go to sharply reduce with the increase of tourists? Questions like these can measure the emotional arousal level of the subjects. And how one feels emotionally for a situation can also be viewed as part of the personal norm. It also indicates how strong the will of following the norm is.

It is obvious that there could be a great variation between the subjects, due to their various knowledge of environment, cognition strategy, and even emotion control. While the NAM aims to establish a prediction for behaviour provided by these antecedents, the next part of my essay addressed the question of how would people act differently within these dimensions. I think habit or convention should make a great contribution. And habit or convention can be well categorized and depicted by culture. We know that people from one same culture are more likely to share the same opinions on certain facts, and that as for people from different cultures, they may form different and even conflicting concepts, which would lead to different ways to solve problems and to make decisions.

So the problem now comes to: how do people from different cultures deal with the environmental issues mentioned above? And also, how should we evaluate such difference? Will this difference do good or harm to our final target of protecting the global environment?

 

4. comparison between eastern and western culture

In this part, I will still try to fit the cultural differences into the NAM structure to make the whole discussion more consistent. And I will compare eastern and western culture, for the former is my own culture and the latter is the culture that most widely-spread in the modern world.

First of all, let’s consider how travellers would calculate the consequences. It might be helpful if we introduce here Hofstede’s culture dimensions (Hofstede & Bond, 1984; Hofstede & Minkov, 2010). According to his theoretical framework, one dimension to evaluate a culture is whether it is long-term or short-term orientation. And it is in most cases acknowledged that western people are more short-term oriented, focusing more on the present rather than the future. While eastern people are more long-term oriented, taking what happens in the future as a more important factor when making decisions.

Though at first look, a long-term orientation is more benefit for environmental protection: people are less likely to sacrifice resources that can be used in the future for present interest, which accords with the concept of sustainable development. However, if travellers are the subject of our discussion, it is a totally reversed situation. Travellers always stay in one place for only a short time, so the faraway future of the destination has nothing to do with the traveller’s own living place. So a typical piece of thought of an eastern traveller would be: I can just leave the coke can here and the true habitants here will dispose it for me sooner or later. In this way, she won’t admit any consequences should be caused by her action. But a western traveller may be more aware of the consequence: if I leave the can here, it is here as I would see. So it is obvious that eastern and western traveller will evaluate the consequence in different ways due to cultural difference.

As for the ascription of responsibility, opinions would also differ for eastern and western travellers. With Hofstede’s framework, we can tell that eastern people tend to be collectivism while western people are individualism. In eastern culture, people are willing to take the responsibility of something together even if they do not act and influence the fact directly. They would always consider themselves as a group when acting. That is why we can observe more eastern people travelling as group, mostly with family, than western ones (Maoz, 2007).

So eastern people tend to take up others’ responsibility if they are in a same collective or community. When going out with a travelling team, they wouldn’t think choosing an eco-friendly hotel instead of the arranged one makes any difference because everyone else is doing the same. With this view, their feeling of personal responsibility may decrease. But on the other hand, they may have a higher group responsibility. They may feel bad or even guilty if they see other members picking flowers or littering. This is by no means the same case with the western. The western behave in a more independent way. They feel more responsible for their own activities.

Thirdly, we would find a clear distinct between the eastern and western personal norm. On the social dimension, eastern people have stronger norm, indicating they would be more likely to be influenced by others. In a journey, they may set as example their families coming with them, other tourists they meet that come from the same country, and maybe the tour guide. Secondly, western people may have higher personal perceived behavioural control, resulting from their high responsibility for personal behaviour. There may not be significant variance in the emotional arousal level of people from these two cultures. Or a better explanation should be that emotion depends a lot on other factors which are not easy to control for these two groups.

At last, it is also worth mentioning that the cultural difference may also affect the choice of travelling destinations. As studied in a research (Dede, 2013), those from Eastern backgrounds were more likely to have a specific interest or purpose for a trip, travelled more for business, and did not wish to combine a range of interests in their vacation. And western people have more interests in finding novelty in their journey. This indicates that western people tend to choose as their destination places that few humans have explored. And a concern is that they may bring pollution to those unexploited areas.

 

5. conclusion

With vivid example of travel, especially comparing travellers from eastern and western culture, we have found that the NAM could fit well in analysis of decision-making process concerning environmental issues. We are happy to reach the conclusion that both the eastern and western living styles have their advantages when taking environmental protection as aim.

There is not a definite rule about environmental protection because everyone lives in a particular surroundings, facing with specific environmental issues. And one also has her own habit, created by the culture and her past experience, which cannot be changed in a short time.

So the better way is, firstly, to establish a firm resolution to help maintaining the ecological balance. We should realize that we are always the habitants on the Earth, but not a possessor, an intruder. It is important for us to get along well with other species, no matter animals or plants. It is not only for their sakes, or only good inherit we can leave to our offspring, but it is the norm of our own living. This is how a human should behave which is so fundamental that there is no further explanation needed to confirm it.

And secondly, we should understand the relation between our behaviour and the environmental change. And we can always be more willing to do as most as we can to protect the environment. We can still enjoy our original living style because one way or another we can be eco-friendly. The western may have the western way, and the eastern have theirs.

 

References

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