How Disciplinary Major and Collaborative Context Impact Environmental Decision-Making

Deeper knowledge of environmental issues—in particular, their root causes, possible solutions, and alternatives—can encourage positive environmental behaviors. Cooperative, as compared to competitive, settings can likewise encourage people to act less selfishly. This study considered how university students made decisions in simulations of farmer irrigation to explore how knowledge and cooperative cues interact. The authors assumed that environmental science students had deeper knowledge of environmental issues, while educational science students had less of this knowledge. The article suggests that either deep knowledge or cooperative settings is sufficient to encourage similar levels of pro-environmental behavior.

To examine this assumption, the authors recruited as participants 61 environmental science majors and 46 educational science majors (107 students total) from Spain's University of Cordoba. The authors did not disclose recruitment methods. Students played a farmer irrigation simulation game, choosing how to irrigate each of their 10 fields every “year,” for 10 years. The three options ranged from the most pro-environmental but least revenue-accruing (rain fed) to the most selfish (groundwater use), with river water irrigation falling in the middle.

Groups of three students, all from the same major, were randomly assigned to either cooperative or competitive “villages.” Cooperative-condition participants could discuss strategy at three stages and were told to maximize both their own and the village incomes. Competitive-condition participants could not communicate, were given information on the other participants' income at three stages, and were told to maximize only their own income.

The authors quantified the “selfishness” of irrigation choices as the number of groundwater-fed fields minus the number of rainfed fields. The authors found that environmental science majors were significantly less selfish than educational science students, and that cooperative condition students were significantly less selfish than competitive condition students. The major finding, however, considered the interaction between a student's discipline and cooperation on behavior. Environmental science students were less selfish whether they were in cooperative or competitive conditions, while education students were less selfish only in the cooperative group. Participants who were educational science majors and in the competitive condition were significantly more selfish. In other words, a cooperative setting alone or being an environmental science student alone appeared sufficient to encourage pro-environmental behavior.

The authors interpret these results as a call to encourage cooperative context setting and for more education on environmental issues. However, the results support the former (collaborative context setting), but not the latter (more education). The authors used students' majors as a proxy not only for knowledge but also interest. Because the authors did not measure underlying levels of environmental concern, they cannot conclude that the difference between majors is due to a difference in knowledge, as opposed to one of interest or of some other factor.