The Application of Persuasive Communication Theory to Promote Visitor Conservation Behaviour at Wellington Zoo

<p>Zoos can play a key role in conservation by facilitating behaviour change in their 600 million visitors annually. However, while numerous articles reinforce the potential zoos have in influencing conservation behaviour in visitors, only a few zoos have quantified the impact a visit has on visitor conservation behaviour. In this thesis, I applied a persuasive communication framework to develop a conservation communication campaign at Wellington Zoo, New Zealand. My results make a significant contribution to the body of literature that evaluates communicating conservation behaviour to zoo visitors and suggest future directions zoos can take to achieve their goal of facilitating conservation behaviour in their visitors. In Study 1, I determined visitor perceptions of conservation wildlife threats and the corresponding actions that could be taken to alleviate these threats. Visitor perceptions were biased towards global awareness of conservation threats with less awareness of local threats, a condition referred to as environmental hyperopia. Furthermore, there was an expert-lay discrepancy in the perception of local and global threats and mitigating actions. Based on these results, two conservation behaviours were selected to advocate to zoo visitors. To determine the content of the message, I applied the Theory of Planned Behaviour in Study 2 to identify the variables (attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioural control) linked to behavioural intention. The variance in visitor intentions for bringing cats in at night and for purchasing FSC wood products were explained by the TPB constructs, with visitor attitudes and norms both strongly linked to intention. Past behaviour also played a role in the habitual behaviour of bringing cats in at night, but not the non-habit forming behaviour of purchasing FSC wood products. In Study 3, I tested which method of communication (signs or animal talks) was the most effective for communicating conservation behaviours. I also tested if talks and signs based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model, implemented after a staff training programme, were more likely to increase visitor satisfaction, relevancy, and elaboration, all key cognitive components that ultimately influence behaviour change. Signs were an ineffective method to communicate conservation messages but animal talks were much more effective in communicating conservation messages to visitors. However, elaboration did not increase after the training programme. This could reflect that the training programme was ineffective and a more intense training programme may need to be implemented in the future. It is also possible that visitors enter the zoo with an already high level of elaboration and attending a keeper talk is not sufficient to increase visitor elaboration above the threshold. Results of this thesis have implications for how zoo programming to enhance zoos’ abilities to foster conservation action in their visitors. Additionally, my results also have broader implications to the field of conservation psychology and provide insight for environmental communication community.</p>

The Application of Persuasive Communication Theory to Promote Visitor Conservation Behaviour at Wellington Zoo

<p>Zoos can play a key role in conservation by facilitating behaviour change in their 600 million visitors annually. However, while numerous articles reinforce the potential zoos have in influencing conservation behaviour in visitors, only a few zoos have quantified the impact a visit has on visitor conservation behaviour. In this thesis, I applied a persuasive communication framework to develop a conservation communication campaign at Wellington Zoo, New Zealand. My results make a significant contribution to the body of literature that evaluates communicating conservation behaviour to zoo visitors and suggest future directions zoos can take to achieve their goal of facilitating conservation behaviour in their visitors. In Study 1, I determined visitor perceptions of conservation wildlife threats and the corresponding actions that could be taken to alleviate these threats. Visitor perceptions were biased towards global awareness of conservation threats with less awareness of local threats, a condition referred to as environmental hyperopia. Furthermore, there was an expert-lay discrepancy in the perception of local and global threats and mitigating actions. Based on these results, two conservation behaviours were selected to advocate to zoo visitors. To determine the content of the message, I applied the Theory of Planned Behaviour in Study 2 to identify the variables (attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioural control) linked to behavioural intention. The variance in visitor intentions for bringing cats in at night and for purchasing FSC wood products were explained by the TPB constructs, with visitor attitudes and norms both strongly linked to intention. Past behaviour also played a role in the habitual behaviour of bringing cats in at night, but not the non-habit forming behaviour of purchasing FSC wood products. In Study 3, I tested which method of communication (signs or animal talks) was the most effective for communicating conservation behaviours. I also tested if talks and signs based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model, implemented after a staff training programme, were more likely to increase visitor satisfaction, relevancy, and elaboration, all key cognitive components that ultimately influence behaviour change. Signs were an ineffective method to communicate conservation messages but animal talks were much more effective in communicating conservation messages to visitors. However, elaboration did not increase after the training programme. This could reflect that the training programme was ineffective and a more intense training programme may need to be implemented in the future. It is also possible that visitors enter the zoo with an already high level of elaboration and attending a keeper talk is not sufficient to increase visitor elaboration above the threshold. Results of this thesis have implications for how zoo programming to enhance zoos’ abilities to foster conservation action in their visitors. Additionally, my results also have broader implications to the field of conservation psychology and provide insight for environmental communication community.</p>

Lange 2021 Making theory useful for understanding high-impact behavior: A response to van Valkengoed et al., 2021

This editorial comment is a reply to van Valkengoed et al.'s comment about the value of theory in conservation psychology.

Finding Purpose in the Conservation of Biodiversity by the Commingling of Science and Ethics

Averting the biodiversity crisis requires closing a gap between how humans tend to behave, individually and collectively, and how we ought to behave—“ought to” in the sense of behaviors required to avert the biodiversity crisis. Closing that gap requires synthesizing insight from ethics with insights from social and behavioral sciences. This article contributes to that synthesis, which presents in several provocative hypotheses: (i) Lessening the biodiversity crisis requires promoting pro-conservation behavior among humans. Doing so requires better scientific understanding of how one’s sense of purpose in life affects conservation-relevant behaviors. Psychology and virtue-focused ethics indicate that behavior is importantly influenced by one’s purpose. However, conservation psychology has neglected inquiries on (a) the influence of one’s purpose (both the content and strength of one’s purpose) on conservation-related behaviors and (b) how to foster pro-conservation purposes; (ii) lessening the biodiversity crisis requires governance—the regulation of behavior by governments, markets or other organization through various means, including laws, norms, and power—to explicitly take conservation as one of its fundamental purposes and to do so across scales of human behaviors, from local communities to nations and corporations; (iii) lessening the biodiversity crisis requires intervention via governance to nudge human behavior in line with the purpose of conservation without undue infringement on other basic values. Aligning human behavior with conservation is inhibited by the underlying purpose of conservation being underspecified. Adequate specification of conservation’s purpose will require additional interdisciplinary research involving insights from ethics, social and behavioral sciences, and conservation biology.

Systematic map of conservation psychology

Conservation science and practice commonly draw on the theories and methods of social psychology to explain human cognition, emotion, and behavior germane to biodiversity conservation. We created a systematic map of the cross‐disciplinary conservation science literature, which draws on social psychology concepts and methods in their application broadly described as conservation psychology. Established protocols were used to systematically collect and collate peer‐reviewed research published in an explicit selection of multidisciplinary conservation journals. We sought to catalog the literature, elucidate trends and gaps, and critically reflect on the state of conservation psychology and its research practices that aim to influence conservation outcomes. The volume of publications per year and per decade increased from 1974 to 2016. Although a diversity of research designs and methods was applied, studies disproportionately focused on specific concepts (attitudes and beliefs), locations (North America and Europe), and contexts (terrestrial, rural). Studies also tended to be descriptive, quantitative, and atheoretical in nature. Our findings demonstrate that although conservation psychology has generally become more visible and prominent, it has done so within a limited space and suggest that disciplinary research principles and reporting standards must be more universally adopted by traditional and multidisciplinary conservation journals to raise the floor of empirical research.

Inoculating the public against misinformation about climate change: A replication study

The Earth’s climate is changing due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Conservation psychology has the capacity to produce research that can inform efforts to modify human behavior to mitigate climate change. However, psychology has recently been facing a replication crisis: Several recent studies have found that the findings of many published psychological studies cannot be reproduced in independent replications. In response to this crisis, psychologists have begun to pursue practices that can improve the replicability and credibility of findings—for example, preregistering data collection and analysis plans before collecting data, and openly sharing data for re-analysis. However, open science practices such as these are not yet widely employed in conservation psychology. We argue that replicability is especially important in conservation psychology given the field’s focus on high stakes applied research. We provide an example of a preregistered replication (of van der Linden et al. 2017). van der Linden et al. reported that they were able to successfully “inoculate” participants against politically motivated misinformation about climate change by pre-emptively warning them of this misinformation. In our replication study, we preregistered hypotheses based on van der Linden et al’s study, along with a detailed data collection and analysis plan (available at https://osf.io/8ymj6/). Our replication study used a mixed between-within design, with data collected via Mechanical Turk (N = 792). We were able to replicate some (but not all) of van der Linden et al’s findings. Specifically, we found that providing information about the scientific consensus on climate change increased perceptions of scientific consensus, as did an inoculation intervention provided prior to provision of misinformation. However, we were unable to replicate their finding that an inoculation intervention counteracted the effect of misinformation to a greater extent than simply providing information about scientific consensus.