Activating empathy increases environmental concern

Activating environmental concern is essential for gaining support to protect the environment. People become concerned about the environment based on different triggers that are specific to how they view the world. Previous research has identified three worldviews that inform environmental concern: (1) egoistic, which is self-protecting and motivated by personal gain or loss; (2) altruistic, which is based on concern for other people's welfare and justice; and (3) biospheric, which values all living things. Egoists consider themselves independent of others and will act for the environment only when motivated by effects that are personally significant. Altruists, who feel connected with other people, will act for the environment based on concern for others. Finally, those with biospheric attitudes consider themselves connected to and dependent on nature and will act out of concern for other living beings, human or not. Empathy is strongly tied to the likelihood of helping others and is activated when someone is asked to take the perspective of another. The author proposed that activating empathy for the environment would lead to increased biospheric behavior and concerns, even if that person did not hold a biospheric view of the world.

The author had previously conducted two studies and used the results to test the hypothesis. The first study had several steps to assess the groupings of common environmental concerns. First, the author had collected data from 957 university students in the US, Peru, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Spain. Participants were asked to describe the environmental problem that was most concerning to them. Responses were analyzed to determine: (1) the environmental problem; (2) the object of concern (whom the problem had affected, such as animals, other people, self, etc.); and (3) the worldview driving each participants' response (egoistic, altruistic, or biospheric). The responses were then sorted by the three worldviews. From these data, the seven most commonly identified objects of concern for each of the worldviews (21 total) were used to create a survey. Then, this survey was given to 245 American undergraduate university students. The participants were asked to rate their level of concern about environmental consequences for each of the 21 objects of concern. The author used statistical analysis and chose four objects of concern from each of the three categories (12 total). Finally, the author gave a final survey to 400 American psychology major undergraduates who rated each of the 12 objects of concern. The author used statistics to analyze the data.

Across both studies, the author concluded that activating empathy results in greater environmental concern than maintaining an objective perspective. Overall, this article found that environmental attitudes can change by promoting empathy resulting in connection to the object of concern.

In the first study, the author found that the undergraduates rated the 12 objects of concern in a manner that confirmed three categories of environmental concern—egoistic, altruistic, biospheric. Using this information, the author created a second study to measure how empathy manipulation would affect environmental concern.

The second study recruited 180 participants from a university's psychology department volunteer pool. Each participant viewed five photos from one of the three worldview categories. The sets of photos either showed humans in nature, animals in nature, or animals being harmed by pollution or trash in nature. After viewing the set of photos, the participants completed a survey that measured environmental concern using the 12 objects of concern from study 1. Half of the participants were told to view the photos and complete the survey objectively while half were told to empathize with the subject of the photos by taking their perspective. The results were then compared using statistical analysis.

When participants were shown photos of animals harmed, the perspective-taking participants showed significantly higher altruistic and biospheric concerns than the objective participants. The objective participants who viewed photos of humans in nature scored significantly higher in the biospheric concerns than the perspective-taking participants, likely because objective participants could focus on nature more than perspective-taking participants who tried to imagine how the person in the photo felt.

These results are limited by how the author defined biospheric concerns as “concern for other living things,” which excludes non-living elements of the environment. For example, the intrinsic value of the Grand Canyon or a body of water is not included in this model of environmental concern. In addition, the model of three worldviews was created through surveying undergraduates and may differ for different age groups or in different locations.

The author recommends that environmental education should work to reduce the perceived distance between self and environment in order to increase biospheric concerns. This might include empathy activation towards the environment by encouraging students to take the view of another species or aspect of the natural world. The author states that empathy can be cultivated by helping a student feel connected to nature through interaction in a natural setting rather than learning abstract concepts in the classroom.