Relationship of Sustainable Behavior, World-Mindedness, National and Global Identities, Perceived Environmental Risk and Globalization Impact Among College Students in the United States.
There are growing efforts at the political, systemic and economic levels to try to understand and promote pro-environment policies, means of production, and consumer and public behavior. This is true in national politics where the perceived presence of outside threat is used to bring together rival factions and feuding groups, and promote nationalism, national unity and cohesion.
Extending the theory to imply that global impact of climate change and environmental degradation represent a threat to all of humanity should lead to a stronger sense of belonging to the human community and encourage sustainable behavior to mitigate their negative impact. Of course the direction of causality is reversible such that while the greater perceived risk may engender stronger affiliation with all of humanity, a stronger world-minded value orientation may increase sensitivity to the risks paused by environmental degradation and climate change.
Taken together, the current findings together with growing literature suggest that perceived risk from climate change and environmental degradation as well as stronger identification with humanity at large tends to promote and encourage more sustainable behavior. It is encouraging to see a growing trend to provide sharable bicycles scattered around college campuses and city streets where people can borrow bicycles for a small fee to go around and then return them to a convenient location.
Moreover, they showed that those who hold higher identities at the global and national levels compared to those who are low on both or high on one and low on the other tended to
report more pro-environment and sustainable behavior. Consistently, in the current study those who had a stronger global identity and stronger national identity tended to report more sustainable
behavior.
