How everyday social environments shape behavioral responses to environmental information remains a core question in environment–behavior research. This study examines how interpersonal communication environments influence individuals’ intentions to counterargue environmental misinformation. Drawing on Social Capital Theory and the Reasoned Action Approach, we conceptualize personal climate discussion networks as routine social environments that structure subjective norms and attitudes, which in turn motivate behaviorally oriented responses. Using an online survey of 525 U.S. adults exposed to three climate misinformation memes, we estimated structural equation models with 5,000 bootstrap resamples. Communication frequency within personal discussion networks consistently predicted stronger pro-climate subjective norms and attitudes, which robustly predicted counterarguing intentions across stimuli. In contrast, perceived credibility neither directly predicted counterarguing intentions nor mediated the relationships between subjective norms or attitudes and counterarguing intentions. These findings suggest that corrective responses to environmental misinformation are driven less by individual-level cognitive evaluation and more by socially structured interpersonal environments that activate norms and attitudes.
Considering agriculture’s significant contribution to the environmental crisis, farmers play a crucial role in conservation. It is thus important to explore the drivers motivating them towards sustainable practices. Farmer-scientist collaboration is a promising tool to promote pro-environmental practices, yet empirical evidence on the outcomes of such collaborations remains sparse. In this study, we aim to assess the association between a long-term scientist-farmer collaboration and farmers’ attitudes and behaviors towards conservation science and the environment. Using three consecutive annual surveys and a longitudinal sample of over 100 farmers, we compared farmers collaborating in a wildlife conservation project with non-collaborators. Collaborators exhibited significant improvement in trust towards conservation science between the first and second survey, while non-collaborators showed gradual improvements. Both groups enhanced their pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors over time. This study underscores the value of collaboration with ecologists in enhancing farmers’ attitudes towards conservation science. It also highlights the intricate relationships between attitudes towards conservation science and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors.
This study examines how planners’ childhood spatial memories are mobilised in reflections on suburban open space design. Drawing on biographical-narrative interviews and mental mapping with urban planners, architects and landscape architects in Germany, it analyses how remembered childhood environments enter professional sense-making concerning child-friendly planning and design. Findings show that informal and unregulated spaces, such as streets, green edges, woods, vacant land and other appropriable environments, were significant in planners’ own childhoods, even though they sit uneasily with planning standards, risk-management expectations, maintenance regimes and the scalar abstraction of masterplanning. Rather than treating childhood memory as a direct source of design decisions, we conceptualise it as a situated and partial repertoire: it can sensitise planners to autonomy, informal play, appropriation and risk negotiation, while also reproducing socially positioned assumptions. These biographical references are best understood as professionally relevant but constrained forms of knowledge that become actionable, muted or displaced within regulatory, scalar and risk-governance conditions.
Conservation conflicts are often shaped by underlying ideological differences among constituents, yet research has rarely examined how broader dominance-based ideologies structure wildlife-specific beliefs. We extend current research by establishing the predictive role of social dominance orientation (SDO) and ecological dominance orientation (EDO) within the wildlife value orientations (WVO) framework, demonstrating that dominance-based ideologies account for unique variance in wildlife beliefs above and beyond established sociodemographic predictors, and providing an empirical foundation for future theoretical integration. Using survey data from a random sample of Minnesota residents ( n = 27,000), we tested direct and indirect pathways linking SDO and EDO to WVOs through political ideology and religiosity, while controlling for key sociodemographic variables. Results showed that SDO and EDO positively predicted utilitarian values and negatively predicted mutualistic values, with additional indirect effects through conservative ideology and religiosity, highlighting the influence of dominance-based ideologies on conservation attitudes.
Adoption of conservation practices in agriculture remains limited despite technical innovations and financial incentives. Social norms, particularly dynamic norms reflecting perceptions of behavioral change over time, may play a key role in facilitating adoption. We examine the Wisconsin Demonstration Farm Networks Program, which leverages peer-to-peer learning to promote conservation practices, namely cover cropping, conservation tillage, and low-disturbance manure application. We interviewed 45 farmers to examine the changes in descriptive, injunctive, and dynamic norms related to conservation adoption. Results indicate that the program initiated normative shifts by providing institutional signals through demonstration farmer recruitment, increasing observability of conservation practices, and sharing adoption trends. These processes supported the diffusion of conservation from innovators to early adopters and early majority farmers. Our Dynamic Norm Diffusion Framework illustrates how conservation programs can strategically leverage normative mechanisms to achieve behavioral tipping points and accelerate sustainable land management across agricultural communities.
