Private land conservation decision-making: An integrative social science model.

Owners and managers of private lands make decisions that have implications well beyond the boundaries of their land, influencing species conservation, water quality, wildfire risk, and other environmental outcomes with important societal and ecological consequences. Understanding how these decisions are made is key for informing interventions to support better outcomes. However, explanations of the drivers of decision making are often siloed in social science disciplines that differ in focus, theory, methodology, and terminology, hindering holistic understanding. To address these challenges, we propose a conceptual model of private land conservation decision-making that integrates theoretical perspectives from three dominant disciplines: economics, sociology, and psychology. The model highlights how heterogeneity in behavior across decision-makers is driven by interactions between the decision context, attributes of potential conservation behaviors, and attributes of the decision-maker. These differences in both individual attributes and context shape decision-makers' constraints and the potential and perceived consequences of a behavior. The model also captures how perceived consequences are evaluated and weighted through a decision-making process that may range from systematic to heuristic, ultimately resulting in selection of a behavior. Outcomes of private land behaviors across the landscape feed back to alter the socio-environmental conditions that shape future decisions. The conceptual model is designed to facilitate better communication, collaboration, and integration across disciplines and points to methodological innovations that can expand understanding of private land decision-making. The model also can be used to illuminate how behavior change interventions (e.g., policies, regulations, technical assistance) could be designed to target different drivers to encourage environmentally and socially beneficial behaviors on private lands.

Prosocial responses to COVID-19: Examining the role of gratitude, fairness and legacy motives.

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced an unprecedented collective action problem. Individuals must make a variety of decisions that influence both their own well-being and the health of those around them. Achieving the collective best-interest depends on most individuals responding in socially optimal ways, which includes remaining familiar with the current status of the pandemic, adhering to health guidelines relevant to the pandemic, and having a constructive emotional response to the pandemic. We sought to examine how individual differences in core moral motivators of collective action (i.e., fairness and gratitude) relate to individuals' COVID-19 responses. In a two-wave study (T1: N = 254; T2: N = 135) conducted in May and June 2020, we find that individual differences in fairness and gratitude were associated with more adaptive (i.e. positive emotions) and prosocial (i.e. remaining familiar with the pandemic, adhering to public health guidelines, prioritizing saving lives) responses to the pandemic. These effects are mediated through differences in impact legacy motives (i.e. being concerned about the impact one leaves behind once they have passed). Understanding the links between gratitude, fairness and legacy motives, and their impact on prosociality, could promote both current and intergenerational prosocial decision making.

Coping with climate change: Three insights for research, intervention, and communication to promote adaptive coping to climate change.

Climate change poses a major threat to human well-being and will be the root cause of a variety of stressors in coming decades. Psychologists have an important role to play in developing interventions and communication strategies to help people understand and cope with climate change impacts. Through a review of the literature, we identify three guiding insights for strategies to promote adaptive coping and resilience to climate change stress. First, it is unlikely that one single "correct" or "best" way of communicating about adaptive coping with climate change exists, but there are established best practices communicators can follow. Second, in implementing these best practices, practitioners must attend to the impact of variability in the nature of different kinds of stress caused by climate change, as well as individual differences in how people chronically respond to stressors. Third, because individuals, communities, and ecosystems are interconnected, work on adaptive coping to climate change must address individual coping in the context of community and ecosystem resilience. These insights from psychological science can be leveraged to promote human flourishing despite increasing stressors posed by climate change.

Scientists' incentives and attitudes toward public communication.

In an era of large-scale science-related challenges and rapid advancements in groundbreaking science with major societal implications, communicating about science is critical. The profile of science communication has increased over the last few decades, with multiple sectors calling for such activities. As scientists respond to calls for public-facing communication, we need to evaluate where the scientific community stands. We conducted a unique census of science faculty at land-grant universities across the United States intended to spur the next generation of science communicators and research. Despite scientists' strong approval of science communication efforts, potential areas of tension, attributable to lack of institutional support and confidence in communication skills, constrain these efforts.

Peer pressure on the riverbank: Assessing catch-and-release anglers' willingness to sanction others' (bad) behavior.

Given the well-documented impacts of angler behavior on the biological fitness of angled and released fish, optimizing the conservation value of catch-and-release angling hinges on the extent to which anglers are willing to adopt recommended best practices and refrain from harmful ones. One potentially powerful mechanism underlying adoption of best practices is the social pressure anglers can apply to one another to enforce community norms and values. Past work in other domains demonstrates that forms of interpersonal communication-including social sanctioning-can foster context-appropriate social norms and increase cooperative behavior; yet to date, little research has examined these dynamics in the context of species conservation. We conducted in-person and online surveys to explore the role of social sanctioning in the context of an internationally renowned wild steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) fishery in British Columbia, Canada. We investigated how diverse social-psychological and demographic factors influence anglers' past and future sanctioning propensity. Results highlight that perceived capacity to influence the angling practices of others and professed concerns about one's own reputation were strongly predictive of both past and future sanctioning. Furthermore, while anglers reported relatively low-levels of past sanctioning behavior, most anglers simultaneously expressed a strong desire to sanction others in the future. Identifying ways to increase the social desirability and visibility of sanctioning actions could assist resource managers in promoting adoption and maintenance of best practices. More broadly, our findings underscore a significant yet underappreciated role for wildlife users and enthusiasts in cultivating a shared conservation ethic to help ensure biological conservation.

The influence of anticipated pride and guilt on pro-environmental decision making.

The present research explores the relationship between anticipated emotions and pro-environmental decision making comparing two differently valenced emotions: anticipated pride and guilt. In an experimental design, we examined the causal effects of anticipated pride versus guilt on pro-environmental decision making and behavioral intentions by making anticipated emotions (i.e. pride and guilt) salient just prior to asking participants to make a series of environmental decisions. We find evidence that anticipating one's positive future emotional state from green action just prior to making an environmental decision leads to higher pro-environmental behavioral intentions compared to anticipating one's negative emotional state from inaction. This finding suggests a rethinking in the domain of environmental and climate change messaging, which has traditionally favored inducing negative emotions such as guilt to promote pro-environmental action. Furthermore, exploratory results comparing anticipated pride and guilt inductions to baseline behavior point toward a reactance eliciting effect of anticipated guilt.

How will I be remembered? Conserving the environment for the sake of one's legacy.

Long time horizons and social distance are viewed as key psychological barriers to proenvironmental action, particularly regarding climate change. We suggest that these challenges can be turned into opportunities by making salient long-term goals and motives, thus shifting preferences between the present self and future others. We tested whether individuals' motivation to leave a positive legacy can be leveraged to increase engagement with climate change and other environmental problems. In a pilot study, we found that individual differences in legacy motivation were positively associated with proenvironmental behaviors and intentions. In a subsequent experiment, we demonstrated that priming legacy motives increased donations to an environmental charity, proenvironmental intentions, and climate-change beliefs. Domain-general legacy motives represent a previously understudied and powerful mechanism for promoting proenvironmental behavior.

Understanding public opinion in debates over biomedical research: looking beyond political partisanship to focus on beliefs about science and society.

As social scientists have investigated the political and social factors influencing public opinion in science-related policy debates, there has been growing interest in the implications of this research for public communication and outreach. Given the level of political polarization in the United States, much of the focus has been on partisan differences in public opinion, the strategies employed by political leaders and advocates that promote those differences, and the counter-strategies for overcoming them. Yet this focus on partisan differences tends to overlook the processes by which core beliefs about science and society impact public opinion and how these schema are often activated by specific frames of reference embedded in media coverage and popular discourse. In this study, analyzing cross-sectional, nationally representative survey data collected between 2002 and 2010, we investigate the relative influence of political partisanship and science-related schema on Americans' support for embryonic stem cell research. In comparison to the influence of partisan identity, our findings suggest that generalized beliefs about science and society were more chronically accessible, less volatile in relation to media attention and focusing events, and an overall stronger influence on public opinion. Classifying respondents into four unique audience groups based on their beliefs about science and society, we additionally find that individuals within each of these groups split relatively evenly by partisanship but differ on other important dimensions. The implications for public engagement and future research on controversies related to biomedical science are discussed.

Profiling the "pro-environmental individual": a personality perspective.

There is considerable scientific interest in the psychological correlates of pro-environmental behaviors. Much research has focused on demographic and social-psychological characteristics of individuals who consistently perform such actions. Here, we report the results of 2 studies in which we explored relations between broad personality traits and pro-environmental actions. Using a wide variety of behavior and personality measures, we consistently found moderate positive relations between Openness to Experience and pro-environmental activities in both a community sample (Study 1: N = 778) and an undergraduate student sample (Study 2: N = 115). In Study 2, we showed that the effect of Openness on pro-environmental behaviors was fully mediated by individuals' environmental attitudes and connection to nature. Our findings suggest that high levels of aesthetic appreciation, creativity, and inquisitiveness, but not personality traits associated with altruism, may have motivated the performance of pro-environmental actions among our respondents. Implications for intervention development are discussed.

Marriage and genetic variation across the lifespan: not a steady relationship?

The prevalence of marriage varies across the lifespan, as does its importance to reproduction and the nurturance of children. We examined genetic and environmental influences on self-reported marriage at each decade from 20 through 70 years of age, using data collected for the Duke Dementia Study, a followed-up subset of the World War II Veteran Twin Registry. Genetic influences best fit a common factor model, supplemented by another, age-specific, genetic factor at age 30. Broad heritability increased from age 20 through 40, and then decreased to zero by ages 60 and 70. A longitudinal Cholesky model best described environmental influences on marriage across the lifespan. Shared environmental factors showed their greatest influence at age 20, no influence at 30 or 40 years, and then, reappeared with influence at 60 and 70. Variance due to error and unique environmental influences increased steadily to age 50 years and then declined slightly.

The etiology of mathematical and reading (dis)ability covariation in a sample of Dutch twins.

The genetic etiology of mathematical and reading (dis)ability has been studied in a number of distinct samples, but the true nature of the relationship between the two remains unclear. Data from the Netherlands Twin Register was used to determine the etiology of the relationship between mathematical and reading (dis)ability in adolescent twins. Ratings of mathematical and reading problems were obtained from parents of over 1500 twin pairs. Results of bivariate structural equation modeling showed a genetic correlation around .60, which explained over 90% of the phenotypic correlation between mathematical and reading ability. The genetic model was the same for males and females.