Test The Consistency Of The Relationship Between Environmental Behavior And Intention

In recent years, following the growing contradiction between man and nature, various global environmental problems emerge. Such as ecological damage, environmental pollution, natural resource shortages.Faceing for the growing global environmental problems, people began to seek their solution. Thus, environment-related researches have become the focus of academia which can not be avoided.As environmental problems closely related with human activities, thus, research which acts as the entry point of human environmental behavior to explore the interaction between humans and the environment becomes extremely important. In the field of environmental psychology, researches about environmental behavior are in large numbers. The researchers primarily concerned with what factors directly or indirectly affect the environmental behavior, and how about the predict of these factors which act on the environmental behavior. Among them, a large number of the researche findings about the influencing factors on the environmental behaviors have supported thai the attitudinal variables could predict environmental behaviors.However, in social psychology, a large number of studies on attitude and behavior have already rejected the predictive effect of attitude on behavior. What led to two results run counter to it? Although the significance of the researches about environmental behavior is very important, but these methods are mainly based on survey which seems too single.And there is a questionable common serious problem: environmental behaviors were not actually observed by researchers, but the environmental behavior intention was inquired instead. then the conclusions based on the suppose that behavior and behavioral intentions are the same come directly extended. However, the hypothesis of environmental behavior in accordance with environmental behavior intention is merely a theoretical assumption, but not a verdict supported by vast empirical evidence. In view of this, using this method to study the factors affecting environmental behavior is likely an over-inference. Moreover,in the researches of environmental behavior, the data of actual behavior are replaced with behavior intention which come from survey. That is the common defect of such study. According to converging evidence,for a lot of each other's flawed conclusions drawn in similar studies, if the defect is not the same as the conclusion of the study were similar, indicating a single research design flaws are insignificant. But if the design flaws of these studies is the same , it is difficult to judge that the conclusion itself is correct or the common defect of studys caused the same conclusion. Therefore, the conclusions of environmental behavior and social psychology research findings on attitudes contrary, it may be due to the common defects of environmental behavior studies. The common defect may be based on a assumption of the consistency relation between environmental behavior and environmental behavior intention. As a result, it is very worthy to test the relationship between environmental behavior and intention by experiments.This study derived from the conflict of the findings between environmental behavior research and attitude-behavior research on social psychology and the question for research on the environmental behavior which is replaced with environmental behavior intention. So, the relationship between environmental attitude and behavior and the relationship between environmental behavior intention and environmental behavior were tested. While, external conditions is also investigated as the impact factor on the environmental behavior and the predictive power of which was compared with environmental behavior intention. The significance of this study is to provide some useful insights and scientific references for the environmental sector to formulate policies, and to promote the development of environmental protection and the solving of environmental problem.This study is divided into two parts, the first part is to attain the data of environmental attitudes and environmental behavior intentions by questionnaires, the second part is a field experiment, by which we can obtain factual data of individual environmental behaviors. In this study, we want to examine the relationship of environmental attitude and environmental behavior intention through the disposal of waste into bins. In the field experiment, we set for the environmental behavior of two factors:"side"and"distance". The variable of"side"has two levels, subjects and garbage bin are on the same side of the road in one level ("same side" level), and in the other level ("opposite side" level) , subjects and garbage bin are on the different sides of the road."Distance"has two levels also. there is a garbage bin 20 meters in front of the position where the subjects got propagandistic card in one level, and 10 meters in the other level. The environmental behavior can be distinguished into three conditions: propagandistic card thrown into the garbage bin, thrown outside and taken away. The experimental procedure was that tested environmental attitudes and environmental behavior intentions of passers-by at random at first. And also distributed to the subjects with a useless card, and then observed environmental behaviors of these subjects.First, do multinominal logistic regression on environmental attitude and environmental behavior. Statistical result was unable to prove that environmental attitude could predict environmental behavior. Do multinominal logistic regression on environmental behavior and intention. The result still couldn't prove the consistent relationship between environmental behavior and intention.Then, investigated the impact of external conditions on the environment behavior. First did Chi-square test of independence on"side"variable and environmental behavior variable. The result did not reach significant level. Did Chi-square test of homogeneity on them when come into"distance"variable. The results showed that only when the garbage bin located in the same side road, the"distance"factor had a significant impact on environmental behavior.Finally, this study compared the predict power of external condition factors and environmental behavior intention on environmental behavior. At this time, we set the data of"to take away the card"as missing values, only to analysis two remaining behavior results which are threw the card in the garbage bin and outside the garbage bin. When only using behavioral intention to predict environmental behavior, the correct prediction rate was 57.4%, close to random prediction. When only using"side"variable to predict the environmental behavior, its positive predictive power was as high as 81.1%. When setting behavioral intention,"distance"variable and"side"variables into the logistic regression equation to co-conducted study, the correct rate of the three together to predict the environmental behavior was 81.7%, little change.By this study, the following conclusions can be drawn: 1) Statistical results can not prove the consistency between environmental behaviors and intentions behavior. It was really over-inference that environmental behavior researchers used environmental behavior intention which was measured by questionnaire to replace real environmental behavior, and draw the research results directly into the environmental behavior. This research approach is not feasible. 2) The influence of external conditions such as the convenience of environmental protection facilities is far more than behavioral intention on environmental behavior. The"side"variable that garbage bin on the same side of the road or on the opposite side has the largest influnce on final environmental behavior. Although the distance from garbage bin can affact environmental behavior, this effect is masked by more powerful influnce factor("side"factor).