Virtually all environmental educators believe that connecting with nature can inspire better environmental citizens, but how does that process of influence work?
As the authors of this study point out, until recently, the bulk of prior studies that connected exposure to nature with environmental behavior used self-reports and questionnaires from participants. Those methods help build the case for the value of connection to nature, yet they give less insight into what the connection actually looks like. More recently, researchers have sought to tease out the causal links in this relationship through specific experiments.
The authors hypothesize that exposure to nature promotes cooperation and, through this mechanism, results in more environmentally friendly behavior. Environmental problems, they argue, are largely issues of collective action: as each person makes a self-motivated decision that uses resources, this collectively results in a “tragedy of the commons” where no one has access to the resource. Increasing cooperation, therefore, could decrease people behaving out of self-interest and instead encourage behavior in a way that promotes community interest. The scholars theorize that promoting cooperative (as opposed to self-interested) behavior is crucial to addressing sustainability issues.
To test this hypothesis, the authors conducted three laboratory-based experiments that manipulated participants' exposure to nature. The authors then asked the participants to play a game that simulated the tragedy of the commons dilemma. The researchers hypothesized that participants who had been exposed to videos of nature-related content would exhibit higher levels of cooperation.
In the first study, 111 participants (all undergraduate university students) watched a 12-minute narrated educational video with content that related either to (a) the natural world or (b) the built environment. The natural environment content was an excerpt from the BBC miniseries Planet Earth, which highlights awe-inspiring natural scenery from around the world; the built environment content was an excerpt from the film Walks with an Architect, which provides a tour of landmark New York City buildings.
The participants then played a computer “fishing game” with three co-players. (The co-players were, in fact, simulated by the program, rather than actual people.) Over the course of numerous fishing seasons, the participants were asked to decide how many fish to extract from the fishery. They were allowed to decide whether to extract fish at, above, or below the ecosystem's replacement rate. Short-term selfish behavior by each player led to depletion of the fishery and diminished returns for all players. By contrast, cooperative, restrained behavior led to steady returns.
The authors conducted a second study with 121 undergraduate participants. In this study, the authors replicated the first study, but they added a control condition for the video component where participants did not watch a natural or built environment video. Both studies found a significant positive correlation between watching the nature video and more cooperative behavior in the fishing game. This correlation did not exist when participants watched the built environment video or the control video.
To test their findings, the authors took their investigation a step further. Other studies have found that exposure to nature improves mood, making subjects feel happier and more relaxed. Although seeing mood changes may be a possible effect of connecting to nature, the authors hypothesized that this effect was less lasting and substantial than the increase in cooperation. To make sure that cooperation—rather than mood change—was at the root of the environmentally friendly behavior, the authors modified their approach for the third study. They had participants watch the three videos and then tested for cooperation using a game that did not have a natural resource as the main component. Through studying 250 participants, they found that those with a developed sense of connection to nature were still more likely to behave cooperatively than the other two groups.
The Bottom Line
<p>Through laboratory-based experiments, the authors demonstrated that connection with nature promotes more cooperative behavior. This finding suggests that nature might play an important role in solving not just environmental problems, but other thorny social issues as well. Environmental educators can facilitate this process by supporting a sense of connection with nature among their students. Additionally, educators can use cooperative learning games and activities to help students practice and develop a potentially increased sense of cooperation.</p>
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