Environmental beliefs and their role in environmental behaviours of undergraduate students

Abstract

A survey of the environmental world-views of undergraduate students found that their views of the environment could be reduced, as had been found by Price et al. (J Environ Psychol, 37, 8–20 2014) into the ‘as elastic’ and the ‘environment as ductile’. The ‘environment as elastic’ summarizes a range of views that focus on the unpredictable nature of the environment and its ability to recover from the impact of human activities. Unlike Price et al. (J Environ Psychol, 37, 8–20 2014), however, the basis of the ‘environment as elastic’ view is solidly based on a fatalistic/non-fatalistic world-view of this age group. The survey suggests that the likelihood of individuals demonstrating environmentally aware behaviour was strongly correlated with their environmental world-view and how their general ideological word views is conditioned by their political alignment. There was, however, a limited range of behaviours that even environmentally aware undergraduates were prepared to take now and into the future and these were correlated with their concern to adopt what might be considered to be conveniently successful life styles.