The degree to which people think they are good at recycling is an important component of recycling behavior, as perceived skills are related to feelings of self-efficacy, which in turn have been shown to increase the chance that people engage in environmental behaviors. People's self-evaluations of their recycling skills, however, cannot always tell us how good they actually are at recycling. Often people overestimate the skills they possess; this overestimation is caused by a number of related factors, such as social norms, expectations of ability, and dispositional traits.
This study's authors hypothesized that the need for cognitive closure, one such dispositional trait, would be especially related to the overestimation of perceived skills. This term refers to people's needs for firm answers rather than feeling comfortable with ambiguity or situational openness.
The researchers explored this relationship between perceived and actual recycling skills, as well as some of the motivational, dispositional, and behavioral factors surrounding these constructs. The research involved enrolling 281 participants in Italy, who were given an initial survey and then asked to engage in a simulated recycling task. The survey included items related to perceived recycling skills, such as, “All in all, I think I am able to correctly perform household waste recycling.” The 10 survey also included questions on five other constructs: recycling attitudes, social norms, perceived control over their recycling, need for cognitive closure, and typical household recycling behavior. The study's “simulated recycling task” element attempted to measure recycling skills by providing 20 pictures of common objects and asking participants to describe how they would dispose of the items using their local recycling procedures.
The researchers explored the patterns of association among these constructs using basic correlations. They also tested a formal model of prediction for perceived and actual skills. That is, the researchers tested whether the constructs of social norms, need for cognitive closure, and perceived control predicted perceived recycling skills and whether perceived skills––alongside household recycling behavior––predicted actual recycling skills.
Results of the survey demonstrated that perceived recycling skills were significantly correlated with all other motivational and dispositional factors, as well as with actual skills. This relationship between perceived and actual skills, however, was only of “moderate” strength (correlation value = .33). In addition, actual recycling skills were significantly related to attitudes, social norms, and household recycling behavior, but not to perceived control nor to the need for cognitive closure. This last relationship is of particular interest because it supports the researchers' hypothesis that the need for cognitive closure would be related to perceived skills but not actual skills. The authors suggest that the need for cognitive closure may explain this: such a need may motivate people to assert and self-inflate their existing recycling abilities and, as a result, not continue to improve those skills.
The Bottom Line
People's perceived and actual recycling skills are closely related to each other as well as to other psychological components of recycling behaviors. They are, however, different, measurable constructs. People tend to overestimate how good they are at recycling, and this overestimation may be related to their need for cognitive closure, potentially because it encourages them to hold a positive view of themselves without continuing to develop their recycling knowledge. Other factors that contribute to this relationship may be key points for intervention for practitioners and educators, including how complicated people think local recycling procedures are and the availability of reliable feedback on correct recycling performance.