Actively Caring for the Environment

Abstract

Perspectives from behavior-based psychology (behaviorism) and person-based psychology (humanism) are integrated to summarize ways to protect the environment. Community-based interventions are needed to decrease environment-destructive behaviors and to increase environment-protective behaviors. Intervention agents are needed to implement these interventions on a large scale, and this requires people to "actively care" enough to emit other-directed (or altruistic) behaviors for environmental protection. Person factors that influence one's propensity to actively care include self-esteem, belongingness, self-efficacy, personal control, and optimism. Thus person-based psychology defines the states or expectancies needed in people to increase their willingness to actively care for the environment, and behavior-based psychology offers the technology for changing behaviors and attitudes (including actively caring person states).