The Impacts Of Information Acquisition On Farmers’ Pro-environmental Behavior

With all kinds of modern productive factors pouring into,Chinese agriculture production capacity has grown steadily,accompanying agricultural environment has gotten worse.In recent years,government has issued a series of measures to improve agricultural environment,but to little effect.To maximum the implementation effect of agricultural environment protection policy,which need to promote farmers to implement pro-environmental behavior on their initiative.Farmers are the fundamental source of agricultural environment pollution,but they are the direct beneficiaries and actual executors of agricultural environmental protection.The dual identity decides that farmers’ behavior change play the key role in agricultural environment improvement.Farmers’ pro-environmental behavior get much attention from the researchers,almost existing research think that farmers form pro-environmental willingness and implement this behavior by adjusting psychological cognitive,based on information which farmers can obtain.Information acquisition is the significant factor that penetrate the whole farmers’ behavior decision process.The new school of behavioral psychology think behavior can emerge before internal affection.In that way,does information acquisition can influence farmers’ behavior directly? And current situation show that farmers’ pro-environmental willingness can’t equal to their behavior,there are gaps between the two.Then,what infactors lead to farmers’ pro-environmental willingness can’t translate into action? Does information acquisition explain this difference existence? Based on above issues,this paper constructed theoretical analysis framework of farmers’ pro-environmental behavior from the prospective of information acquisition,hoping to promote farmers’ to implement pro-environmental behavior chronically and sustainably.The specific course of this paper as followed : First,based on previous literature at home and abroad,this paper geted a clear awareness about the research status and results which summarized the farmers’ pro-environmental willingness,behavior and information acquisition,and presented the significance and method of this paper.Second,this paper constructed theoretical analysis framework,supported by the theory of planned behavior,behavioral change theory,information acquisition theory,self-perception theory.Finally,this paper selected Yangling in Shaanxi province as research area,and received 557 valid data to conduct empirical research:(1)using Cronbach’s α,CITC,CAID,EFA,CFA and discriminant validity test to examine the reliability and validity of the scale.(2)testing information acquisition’s indirect influence on farmers’ pro-environmental willingness and direct influence on farmers’ pro-environmental behavior.(3)verifing the difference between farmers’ pro-environmental willingness and their actual behavior,and testing information acquisition’s regulating effect on the process of translating willingness into behavior,and dividing research sample into two groups according to information acquisition degree to further prove this regulating effect.Through empirical research,the main conclusions as followed:(1)Information acquisition can indirectly influence farmers’ pro-environmental behavior by adjusting their attitude,subjective norm,perceptual behavior control,in which perceptual behavior control has the most influence.(2)Information acquisition is remarkable to promote farmers to adopt pro-environmental behavior.With farmers’ information acquisition degree enhancing,the probability of farmers implementing pro-environmental behavior is increasing.(3)Information acquisition has a negative regulating effect on the translation process of farmers’ pro-environmental willingness to behavior.When farmers obtain more information about pro-environmental behavior,the relationship between farmers’ pro-environmental willingness and their behavior is weaker.