Place-based estimates of cigarette butt litter raise environmental justice concerns in the United States.

Littering of cigarette butts is a major environmental challenge. In 2022, ~124 billion cigarette butts were littered in the United States. This litter may pose an environmental justice concern by disproportionately affecting human and environmental health in communities of color or communities of low socioeconomic status.

Responding to natural disasters: Examining identity and prosociality in the context of a major earthquake.

How does a major natural disaster relate to individuals' orientation towards society? We collected repeated cross-sectional surveys before (n = 644) and after the 2010 Chile earthquake (n = 1,389) to examine levels of national identity, prosocial values, helping motivations, and prosocial behaviours in the context of such a calamitous societal event. Our research questions, derived from the literature on helping in times of crisis, considered how natural disasters may implicate identity and prosociality, as well as how identity, prosocial values, and motivations are linked to prosocial action after a disaster. Higher levels of national identity, helping motivations, and disaster-related helping were found after the earthquake, suggesting that in the aftermath of a disaster, people unite under a common national identity and are motivated to take action related to disaster relief.

The Promise and Limitations of Using Analogies to Improve Decision-Relevant Understanding of Climate Change.

To make informed choices about how to address climate change, members of the public must develop ways to consider established facts of climate science and the uncertainties about its future trajectories, in addition to the risks attendant to various responses, including non-response, to climate change. One method suggested for educating the public about these issues is the use of simple mental models, or analogies comparing climate change to familiar domains such as medical decision making, disaster preparedness, or courtroom trials. Two studies were conducted using online participants in the U.

The impact of changing attitudes, norms, and self-efficacy on health-related intentions and behavior: A meta-analysis.

Objective: Several health behavior theories converge on the hypothesis that attitudes, norms, and self-efficacy are important determinants of intentions and behavior. However, inferences regarding the relation between these cognitions and intention or behavior rest largely on correlational data that preclude causal inferences. To determine whether changing attitudes, norms, or self-efficacy leads to changes in intentions and behavior, investigators need to randomly assign participants to a treatment that significantly increases the respective cognition relative to a control condition, and test for differences in subsequent intentions or behavior.

Understanding proenvironmental intentions and behaviors: The importance of considering both the behavior setting and the type of behavior.

To better understand the consistency of people's proenvironmental intentions and behaviors, we set out to examine two sets of research questions. First, do people perform (1) different types of proenvironmental behaviors consistently, and (2) the same proenvironmental behavior consistently across settings? Second, are there consistent predictors of proenvironmental behavioral intentions across behavior and setting type? Participants reported four recycling and conservation behaviors across three settings, revealing significant variability in rates of behaviors across settings. Prior behavior, attitudes toward the behavior, and importance of the behaviour consistently predicted proenvironmental intentions.

Time perspective and volunteerism: The importance of focusing on the future.

Because volunteerism is a planned activity that unfolds over time, people who more frequently focus on the future might also be more likely to initiate volunteerism and sustain it over time. Using longitudinal (Study 1) and experimental (Study 2) paradigms, we investigated whether time perspective, and in particular a person's orientation toward the future, is related to volunteers' beliefs and behavior. In Study 1, a person's dispositional level of future time perspective was closely linked to volunteer beliefs and behavior.