The questionnaire arrives at a moment when sport is under growing pressure to clean up its act. The International Olympic Committee has embedded environmental criteria into its Olympic Agenda 2020+5, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals urge responsible practices across all sectors, and the European Union Work Plan for Sport 2021–2024 explicitly calls on federations and clubs to reduce their environmental footprint. Yet researchers have long noted a frustrating gap: while institutional recommendations pile up, grassroots sports organizations lack standardized tools to translate those lofty frameworks into concrete, operational diagnoses of what is actually happening on the ground. Scales exist for environmental attitudes in outdoor physical activity and for green practices as seen by users of sporting events, but almost nothing targets the professionals who make decisions inside local clubs.

To fill that void, the research team, led by scientists at the Catholic University of Murcia in Spain with collaborators in the Netherlands, Brazil, and beyond, built an instrument with 34 items in total. Six capture sociodemographic information, 25 are closed Likert-scale items scored from 1 to 5 and organized into five theoretical dimensions, and three are open-ended questions probing barriers, good practices, and opportunities for improvement. The five dimensions reflect decades of psychological research on pro-environmental behavior: Knowledge, Attitudes, Current practices, Barriers/Needs, and Self-efficacy/Commitment. The theoretical backbone draws on the Theory of Planned Behavior, the influential model holding that behavior depends not only on attitudes but also on perceived behavioral control, subjective norms, and the contextual constraints that surround any decision.

The development process was iterative and rigorous. A team of six university lecturers, five specialists in sports science and one psychologist, generated an initial bank of 35 questions grounded in the literature on sustainability in sport and club management. After internal refinement, the instrument moved to a content validity phase in which ten expert judges, each with at least ten years of professional experience as coaches, club managers, or tournament directors, independently rated every item for clarity, coherence with its assigned dimension, and relevance on a 4-point scale. The acceptability threshold was set at an Item Content Validity Index of 0.78, meaning at least 78 percent of judges had to rate an item as adequate or very adequate.

The results of that expert scrutiny were striking. Twenty-three of the 25 Likert items cleared the threshold across all three criteria, and only two fell short in at least one: a mobility item in the Current practices dimension scored 0.70 for relevance, and a technical-support item in Barriers/Needs scored 0.70 for clarity, coherence, and relevance. Both were reformulated before the field study. At the scale level, the overall content validity index averaged 0.931, a figure the authors describe as excellent and consistent with classical criteria for expert panels of this size. In plain terms, the experts agreed that the questionnaire captures what it claims to capture.

The field version was then administered to 99 tennis professionals from 28 European countries, with an average age of 48 years and an average of 29 years in the tennis sector. The sample included 54 coaches, 15 tournament directors, and 14 managers, mostly from private clubs. Psychometric analysis followed established guidelines, including the COSMIN framework for evaluating measurement properties. Internal consistency, estimated with both Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega, proved satisfactory to excellent for four dimensions, with alpha values ranging from 0.831 to 0.871. Exploratory factor analysis, conducted on the 25 ordinal items with minimum residuals extraction and Oblimin rotation, showed adequate sampling adequacy with a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin index of 0.767 and a highly significant Bartlett’s test of sphericity.

Here the study delivered one of its most technically interesting findings. Parallel analysis supported a four-factor solution rather than the five theoretical dimensions the researchers had proposed. The surprise was the merger of Attitudes and Self-efficacy/Commitment into a single empirical cluster, with items such as collaborating on environmental initiatives and leading by example loading heavily together, at values up to 0.844. The authors caution that this overlap does not mean the two constructs are theoretically equivalent. Rather, in this sample of professionals, valuing sustainability and perceiving oneself as capable of promoting change appear to be experienced as part of a single, closely connected disposition toward environmental action. Because the sample-to-item ratio was roughly 4 to 1, at the borderline of what is considered adequate for exploratory factor analysis, the four-factor structure should be regarded as preliminary until replicated in larger, independent samples with confirmatory factor analysis.

The descriptive results revealed what the researchers call an attitude-behavior gap, and the numbers tell the story vividly. Pro-environmental attitudes scored a mean of 4.01 on the 5-point scale, the highest of any dimension, while the actual implementation of sustainable practices lagged at 3.47, the lowest. Knowledge sat at 3.53 and self-efficacy/commitment at 3.71. The qualitative responses converged on the same interpretation: the most frequently cited barriers were financial resources, institutional dependency, and insufficient technical training, while the good practices described were mostly low-intensity measures such as waste management, efficient water use, and basic energy efficiency. Interestingly, the Barriers/Needs dimension showed weak internal consistency, with alpha at 0.533, suggesting the block combines two related but distinct contents, perceived obstacles on one hand and perceived needs for support on the other. The authors flag this dimension as a priority for future refinement.

The study is candid about its limitations, and they matter for how the findings should be read. The sample was recruited through non-probability sampling, and 41.4 percent of respondents reported prior training in sustainability, a proportion unlikely to reflect club managers in general. This points to a probable self-selection effect in which already environmentally conscious professionals were more likely to participate, potentially inflating the favorable attitude and self-efficacy scores. The questionnaire also relies on self-reporting, leaving room for social desirability bias. And because the multilingual adaptation was carried out directly by consortium partners without a formal forward-backward translation procedure or an independent check of linguistic equivalence, item wording may not be fully equivalent across the 28 countries, introducing cultural and semantic noise that could have affected both responses and the stability of the factor solution.

Even with those caveats, the implications are significant for the broader movement to green the world of sport. The GreenTennis-SUSCLUB provides the first validated, context-specific instrument for diagnosing sustainability in tennis clubs from the perspective of decision-makers, and its mixed-methods design, combining quantitative scales with thematic analysis of open-ended responses in NVivo, offers convergent evidence that the tool captures a meaningful sustainability profile. The attitude-behavior gap it documents is not merely an individual inconsistency; the authors interpret it as a reflection of governance conditions in which favorable views coexist with ageing infrastructure, restricted autonomy, and insufficient technical support. Future research will test the five-dimensional model against the four-factor solution, evaluate measurement invariance across coaches and managers, and examine temporal stability and sensitivity to change following interventions. For now, the message to thousands of clubs across Europe is clear: the will to act is there, and now there is a scientific yardstick to measure whether that will becomes action.

Subject of Research: Tennis clubs care about the planet but struggle to act, new questionnaire reveals

Article Title: Environmental sustainability in sports clubs: development and preliminary validation of the GreenTennis-SUSCLUB questionnaire

Article References: García-Roca, J. A., Maciá-Andreu, M. J., Morales-Belando, M. T., Arranz-Escudero, J. A., Tinaz, C., Piuvezam, G., & Vegue-Parra, E. (2026). Environmental sustainability in sports clubs: development and preliminary validation of the GreenTennis-SUSCLUB questionnaire. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, Article 1987947. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1987947

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2026.1987947

Keywords: environmental sustainability, tennis, questionnaire validation, pro-environmental behavior, sports management, GreenTennis-SUSCLUB, psychometrics, Environmental, sustainability, sports, clubs, development

The research, published in Scientific Reports, examined three climate-related emotions that previous studies had identified as powerful motivators: anger, compassion and hope. Earlier work had shown that angry people are more likely to want to hold so-called climate criminals to account, that compassionate people are inclined to support victims of environmental damage, and that people who feel hopeful about solutions develop stronger intentions to act. Surveys consistently confirm these links. What surveys cannot easily confirm, however, is whether those intentions survive contact with reality, and that is precisely the gap the Norwegian and Polish team set out to close.

To do so, the researchers designed an experiment that went beyond the questionnaire. More than 2,000 participants in Norway and Poland were each given 200 Norwegian kroner or 20 Polish zloty, a modest but real sum of their own money. The participants were then exposed to a series of short stories crafted to trigger different climate-related emotions. Afterward, they were offered a concrete way to act on whatever they felt. They could donate their participation fee to charity, in this case the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), or they could work through a set of deliberately tedious pattern-finding sheets, with the experimenters donating on their behalf in proportion to the work completed. The second option, which the team calls a real impact task, is what distinguishes this study from most of the existing literature.

The results caught the researchers off guard. Very few participants, hardly any by the team’s own account, gave more money because of the emotional stories they had read, compared with people who had not been exposed to them. The difference in behavior between the emotional conditions and the control was negligible at best. Christian Klöckner, a professor at NTNU’s Department of Psychology who studies why people make environmentally friendly or unfriendly choices, admitted that the team was surprised. The emotional mechanisms that reliably predict stated intentions in surveys simply did not translate into changes in real, costly behavior when put to the test.

This disconnect matters because the field has accumulated a substantial body of evidence showing that emotions do shape attitudes. Klöckner notes that when people are angry, they report stronger motivation and intentions. When people feel a bad conscience, they are more willing to accept climate policies. And hope appears to be a precondition for any engagement at all, since people who believe nothing can be done tend to do nothing. None of that prior evidence is invalidated by the new findings. Instead, the study exposes a fissure between two layers of psychology: the layer where feelings form intentions, and the layer where intentions become behavior. The emotional stories shifted the first layer but left the second essentially untouched.

Klöckner’s earlier work hints that this fissure runs deep. In a separate large-scale project aimed at reducing household energy consumption, his team found that their interventions did in fact lower energy use, yet the participants’ psychological mindsets remained unchanged. The eventual energy savings, he explains, had very little to do with the individuals’ stated intention to save energy. Some people revise their intentions in response to emotional information, while those who make genuine, measurable changes, such as cutting electricity consumption, are not necessarily doing so for the reasons that survey research would predict. The practical lesson is that intention-based measures, the standard currency of environmental psychology, may be poor proxies for the outcomes that actually matter.

For conservation and environmental organizations, the findings arrive at a consequential moment. Non-profits depend heavily on financial contributions from supporters, and understanding what makes people start, stop or continue donating is central to their survival. WWF, which received the donations in this study, openly uses anger, compassion and hope in its fundraising, typically paired with a call to action. Denise Kohn, Senior Corporate Advisor for Partnerships at WWF in Norway, says the organization knows that its financial supporters donate for an average of five to six years, and that any new research shedding light on donor motivation is of genuine interest to the fundraising team.

Kohn also points out that climate itself has proven a difficult fundraising proposition. WWF has never been particularly successful in raising money on climate alone; nature remains a much stronger entry point for donors, and the current political and geopolitical circumstances mean that other crises frequently crowd climate out of public attention. In that sense, the NTNU and Warsaw findings do not simply tell campaigners that emotion fails. They suggest that the emotional architecture of climate engagement is more complicated than a single powerful feeling, and that organizations may need to look beyond one-off emotional appeals if they want to secure durable, behavior-level commitment from their audiences.

The research team is careful not to frame the results as a counsel of despair. Anger, compassion and hope still play vital roles in shaping how people understand climate change, and they likely remain necessary preconditions for engagement even if they are not sufficient on their own. What the study demonstrates is that the motivation behind actual change is more complex than any single overpowering emotion. To untangle that complexity, the team now intends to fund an even larger survey spanning ten countries, aiming to map the differences between people in the intricate patterns of emotional responses to climate change and how those patterns relate to real behavior.

For a field that has leaned heavily on the power of feeling, the message from this experiment is uncomfortable but clarifying. If the goal is to move people from concern to action, the path may run less through the heart than through the messy, contextual, and poorly understood machinery that converts private intention into public behavior. As Klöckner and his colleagues continue their cross-national work, communicators, campaigners and policymakers may need to treat emotional storytelling not as a lever that reliably moves behavior, but as one ingredient in a far more complicated recipe, one that this new line of research is only beginning to write down.

Subject of Research: The impact of anger, compassion and hope on pro-environmental behavior and climate action

Article Title: The negative effect of emotion in climate action

Article References: The negative effect of emotion in climate action. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate action, emotion, anger, compassion, hope, pro-environmental behavior, donations, NTNU, University of Warsaw, climate psychology, behavioral research, WWF

The review’s technical innovation lies in its use of “interaction patterns,” a concept borrowed from Kahn and colleagues’ work on a “nature language.” Rather than treating all human-bird contact as a single undifferentiated exposure, the researchers defined an interaction pattern as a generalizable characterization of the essential features of a human action involving birds, abstract enough to apply across situations yet specific enough to capture the meaningful structure of engagement. In its simplest linguistic form, an interaction pattern follows a verb-preposition-noun structure: watching wild birds at a feeder, listening to recorded birdsong, caring for a companion bird. This precision matters because mechanistically distinct forms of contact, such as direct intentional birdwatching versus incidental exposure to birds in one’s neighborhood, may engage different psychological and physiological pathways and therefore produce different kinds of benefits.

The methodological apparatus behind the review was correspondingly rigorous. The team followed PRISMA-ScR guidance for scoping reviews, pre-registered the protocol in PROSPERO in December 2025, and searched Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed from database inception through November 16, 2025, using iteratively pilot-tested Boolean terms with wildcards such as bird*, avian*, and birdsong* to capture the full vocabulary of human-bird interaction. From 26,772 initial records, 196 studies survived multistage title and abstract screening. Eligible studies had to involve at least one physical, sensory, or representational interaction with birds that the general public could plausibly enact in everyday life, and had to report at least one human health or well-being outcome. Studies of industrial poultry production, veterinary science, zoonotic disease, and ecosystem services unlinked to individual human contact were excluded, as were studies where birds could not be distinguished from broader nature exposure.

Data extraction was calibrated in two phases across 11 team members using a 17-column Google Sheet with drop-down menus to limit coding drift, ultimately achieving an interrater reliability score of 97.3 percent. The extractors coded country, setting, study design, sample characteristics, interaction type and measurement, comparator presence, outcomes, timing, covariates, and funding sources. The resulting corpus was dominated by auditory exposure to birds, which appeared in 44 studies, or 22 percent of the review, followed by incidental contact with wild birds in everyday environments at 35 studies, birds in culture or media at 30, intentional birding or birdwatching at 22, and companion or captive bird interactions at 18. Study designs split almost evenly between experimental studies and observational cross-sectional surveys, with 51 percent of studies lacking any control or comparison group, a limitation the authors flag repeatedly.

The outcome landscape was equally revealing. Psychological well-being was the most studied domain, appearing in 81 studies, followed by mood at 58 and nature connectedness at 37. Cognitive restoration appeared in 31 studies and stress in 30. Physiological measurement was comparatively rare: heart rate or heart rate variability was assessed in 15 studies, brain activity in nine, blood pressure in six, and cortisol or stress hormones in only two. Nearly two-thirds of studies relied on validated self-report scales, and most benefits were measured immediately after the interaction, with longitudinal or repeated assessments occurring in just 14 percent of studies. This temporal profile suggests the field has excelled at documenting short-term restorative effects while leaving the durability of those effects largely unexamined.

When the researchers mapped specific interaction-benefit pairings, several robust clusters emerged, each supported by ten or more studies. Listening to birdsong was linked to better cognitive functioning, mental health and well-being, and physiological markers of health, including lower heart rate and reduced autonomic arousal. Birding and birdwatching, as well as incidental contact with birds in nature-rich living environments, were linked to better mental health and well-being alongside pro-environmental attitudes, behaviors, and nature connectedness. Birds encountered through media, artwork, and digital representations, as well as companion or captive birds, were linked with better mental health and well-being. The single largest volume of evidence connected birding or birdwatching with mental health and well-being, with 70 distinct findings, followed by incidental contact with wild birds at 48 findings and listening to birdsong at 34.

These patterns align remarkably well with established theory in environmental psychology. Stress reduction theory, proposed by Ulrich and colleagues, holds that nonthreatening natural stimuli trigger psychophysiological reactions that buffer against stress, involving parasympathetic activation that manifests as lower heart rate, lower blood pressure, and reduced stress hormones. The nonthreatening, often melodious harmonics of birdsong fit this mechanism precisely, signaling environmental safety and promoting relaxation. Attention restoration theory, advanced by Kaplan, suggests that urban environments demanding constant directed attention produce mental fatigue, while natural stimuli rich in “soft fascination” effortlessly hold attention without cognitive exertion, allowing the brain’s directed attention capacity to rest and replenish. The dynamic, unpredictable behavior of birds serves as a prime example of soft fascination. The biophilia hypothesis, articulated by E.O. Wilson, provides the evolutionary rationale: humans possess an innate, genetically determined tendency to seek connections with other forms of life, and birds fulfill that intrinsic need. A newer predictive processing account, integrating active inference with what Tryjanowski and Murawiec call the “predostatic mind,” proposes that birdwatching functions as a clinically relevant exercise in flexibly switching between alarm, seek, and balance modes of brain function, with possible implications for ADHD, depression, and addiction.

The practical implications for nature-based therapy are substantial. Unlike forms of nature contact requiring access to large natural spaces, birds are present in most human-dominated environments and can be incorporated into therapeutic settings with minimal resources. The authors suggest that smart bird feeders, water features, and nest boxes installed outside clinical office windows, with audio or video streams available indoors, could provide subtle restorative stimuli during therapy sessions and in waiting rooms. For older adults and institutional settings where direct nature access is limited, reminiscence-based approaches can incorporate bird-related prompts to stimulate autobiographical memories, and indoor multisensory programs such as Bird Tales can be facilitated by care staff without specialized training. The review also connects these findings to the emerging field of Ecological Medicine, a model pursuing interventions that create reciprocity, relationality, and connectedness among humans, other biota, and the environment. Because bird interactions overwhelmingly enhance environmental attitudes, which are among the strongest predictors of pro-environmental behavior, bird-based therapy may contribute to a healthier biosphere that in turn further improves human health.

Yet the review is candid about its own boundaries. The search strategy was oriented toward benefits and did not systematically target adverse outcomes such as zoonotic disease, window collisions, allergens, fear-based responses, or sleep disruption, meaning the conclusions may reflect a positive bias inherent in the published literature. Only seven findings, all associative, reported harmful relationships, and no experimental study documented negative effects. The authors also note emerging evidence of costs: a survey of over 2,400 birdwatchers documented “negative social jetlag,” with birders arising roughly 15 minutes earlier on free days and accumulating about 45 minutes of sleep deficit on birding days. Geographic coverage was thin in Central and South America and Africa, English-language indexing may have excluded regional studies, and no formal risk of bias assessment was performed, a limitation shared by prior reviews in this space. The authors call for experimental designs comparing bird species with varying acoustic features, meta-analytic quantification of specific activities’ effects on well-being, and research into underexplored interaction types such as citizen science and bird handling. As the evidence base matures, the humble act of noticing a bird may come to be recognized not as a pastime but as a precise, accessible, and theoretically grounded component of human health care.

Subject of Research: A systematic scoping review mapping human-bird interaction patterns and their associations with human health and well-being.

Article Title: The human health and well-being benefits of birds: a systematic scoping review of interaction patterns

Article References: Browning, M. H. E. M., McAnirlin, O., Miller, W., Beard, H., Breed, M. W., Rubalcava, S. E., Engelman, C., Hatami, N., Jaggi, A., Maynard, A., Merker, H., Morassafar, S., Siepker, K. L., Shin, S., Vinas-Rogers, M., Zhang, K., & Pollack, L. (2026). The human health and well-being benefits of birds: a systematic scoping review of interaction patterns. Frontiers in Bird Science, 5, Article 1871909. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbirs.2026.1871909

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fbirs.2026.1871909

Keywords: birds, birdwatching, birdsong, mental health, well-being, nature contact, scoping review, ecological medicine, nature-based therapy, pro-environmental behavior, cognitive restoration, companion birds

The article, by Adriano Angelucci and Alberto Pirni of the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, develops what the authors call an indirect-pathways account of norm-based intervention design. Their starting observation is sociological: buying bottled water functions as what scholar Andrew Szasz termed an inverted quarantine, a private purchase that insulates individuals from perceived environmental risk rather than pressing for collective solutions. The trouble is that this private exit feeds back into public decay. As bottled brands advertise purity, distrust of tap water deepens, political pressure to fund and oversee public systems erodes, and the visible prevalence of bottled water reshapes what psychologists call descriptive norms, the beliefs about what other people do. If everyone at the table reaches for a bottle, the silent inference is that tap water must be suspect.

Norm-based nudges, the low-cost modifications of choice environments that steer behavior without coercion, are among the most effective tools in the behavioral policy toolkit. A meta-analysis of 87 studies found robust effects of social norms across energy use, recycling, mobility, and water conservation, with norm messages often outperforming purely informational campaigns and rivaling economic incentives. Field evidence bears directly on drinking choices: in an Italian restaurant study, a simple poster stating that two in three locals drank tap water cut bottled orders by twelve percentage points in a single month, from 96 percent to 84 percent of orders. But the authors warn that such messages are not plug-and-play. Their success depends intimately on the beliefs, baselines, and reference groups present in the target population.

The context sensitivity of norm nudging is vividly illustrated by the classic hotel towel-reuse literature. In American field experiments, descriptive-norm cards such as the majority of guests reuse their towels outperformed standard environmental appeals, and hyper-local variants referring to guests in the same room worked best. Yet a German replication found that overall reuse was already high, that descriptive messages beat a no-message baseline but were no better than the environmental appeal, and that the same-room framing sometimes backfired. The lesson the authors draw is that identical norm claims can lift behavior in one setting and stall in another, depending on baseline headroom, the credibility and locality of the referent, audience involvement, and whether the cited percentage passes a plausibility check. Without prior diagnostic research, designers risk broadcasting a norm that is inert, ambiguous, or counterproductive, even normalizing the undesired behavior when bottled-water reliance is genuinely widespread.

The paper’s central theoretical claim goes further than the now-standard advice that nudges should be grounded in surveys. Drawing on the Reasoned Action Approach developed by Martin Fishbein and Icek Ajzen, the authors argue that social norms frequently influence behavior not directly but indirectly, through mediating constructs: personal norms, the felt moral obligation to act; attitudes toward the behavior; and perceived behavioral control, or self-efficacy. These mediators are themselves grounded in underlying behavioral beliefs about outcomes, normative beliefs about what salient others do and approve, and control beliefs about barriers and capabilities. Research on mediated norm effects suggests that when surveys model perceived norms as a single direct predictor, their total influence is likely to be underestimated, because much of it flows through channels the model never measures.

This matters practically because the household tap-versus-bottled decision is unusually belief-sensitive. Studies consistently find that perceived safety, taste expectations, trust in providers, and presentation cues explain far more of the variance in household preference than measured water quality, which can be surprisingly decoupled from perception. Blind tastings often favor tap water, especially when it is chilled and attractively served, yet many households experience bottled water as the more frictionless and socially low-risk option at meals. In-home consumption is private, so a norm cue transplanted from a restaurant is unlikely to work through public compliance pressure; it succeeds, the authors argue, only if it reshapes internal expectations about what families like ours serve and approve. Convenience here means perceived meal-time ease, not physical access, since tap water is already at the point of use.

From this analysis the paper derives a belief-sensitive survey blueprint. The instrument should elicit behavioral beliefs with expectancy-value logic, quantifying how likely and how desirable respondents consider consequences such as taste as served, purity backed by visible testing, convenience, cost savings, and hospitality signaling. It should localize normative beliefs, asking which specific groups, neighbors, buildings, or friend circles, actually serve tap water at dinner and how much they approve of it, and pairing these perceptions with administrative benchmarks to estimate misperception gaps, the leverage points for norm-debiasing messages. It should probe control beliefs and self-efficacy, distinguishing confidence from concrete constraints such as having space for a carafe or knowing who tests the water. Intentions over a four-week horizon and recent self-reported behavior round out the measurement, with behavior serving mainly as a baseline and headroom indicator.

Once the local belief landscape is mapped, design follows diagnosis rather than guesswork. If households feel moral duty but lack confidence, a credible descriptive norm can be paired with micro-scripts such as filling the carafe nightly and keeping it on the middle fridge shelf. If the behavior feels optional, injunctive cues tied to shared local values, waste reduction or children’s futures, can transform latent acceptance into obligation. If taste skepticism dominates, the priority is attitude repair through brief transparency about testing and presentation framing that sets expectations before the first sip. And where quiet adopters underestimate their peers, a pure norm-debiasing message stating the verified local majority, placed where the decision happens, is indicated. Because one neighborhood can contain segments in every quadrant, the authors recommend working with a handful of empirically identified segments rather than attempting one-to-one personalization, deploying tailored packages through channels utilities already use, from billing inserts to condominium newsletters and front-of-fridge prompts.

The authors are careful about limits. The paper is theoretical and does not report new behavioral data; one-wave surveys cannot settle causal direction and remain vulnerable to reverse causality, so stronger implementations should be longitudinal or experimental, ideally using structural equation modeling to estimate indirect pathways. Persistence is not guaranteed either, since entrenched taste expectations and distrust may require adaptive reinforcement rather than one-off messaging, and the survey-first strategy carries real costs that lower-capacity settings can meet only with lighter versions. The scope is likewise confined to contexts where tap water is objectively safe, as in most high-income countries. Even so, the broader implication is stark: because norm effects in this domain are often mediated, policies that measure only direct norm-to-behavior links will systematically underestimate normative leverage and may misallocate effort, funding more information when a chilled carafe, a credible neighbor statistic, or a hospitality-affirming script would do the real work. Diagnose beliefs first, the authors conclude, then deploy norm nudges that those beliefs can carry.

Subject of Research: Belief-sensitive design of social norm interventions to increase household tap water use

Article Title: Belief-sensitive norm nudging for household tap water use: an indirect-pathways argument

Article References: Angelucci, A., & Pirni, A. (2026). Belief-sensitive norm nudging for household tap water use: an indirect-pathways argument. Frontiers in Water, 8, Article 1891417. https://doi.org/10.3389/frwa.2026.1891417

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frwa.2026.1891417

Keywords: norm nudging, tap water, bottled water, social norms, Reasoned Action Approach, behavioral public policy, green nudges, survey design, pro-environmental behavior, perceived behavioral control, water policy, misperception gaps

The research, led by Serah Kabui Kahuri and colleagues, focused on the Laisamis and Saku sub-counties, an ecologically diverse region of roughly 26,104 square kilometers within Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands. These rangelands are critical to the national economy: they cover more than 70 percent of Kenya, host most of the country’s national parks and reserves, and support over 75 percent of its cattle herds. Kenya’s pastoral sector is valued at approximately US$1.13 billion, with livestock accounting for 92 percent of that figure. Yet degradation continues through overgrazing, the spread of invasive species such as Acacia reficiens and Opuntia stricta, subdivision and fencing of land, and the erosion of traditional ecological governance.

Protection Motivation Theory, originally developed to explain protective health behavior, proposes that people act when they appraise both a threat and their capacity to cope with it. Threat appraisal combines perceived vulnerability and perceived severity, while coping appraisal includes self-efficacy, response efficacy, and response costs. The research team extended this framework by adding two constructs rarely tested in restoration studies: perceived political willingness, meaning pastoralists’ belief that the government genuinely prioritizes restoration, and perceived incentives, meaning the expected economic benefits from restoring degraded land. Reliability analysis confirmed that these constructs adequately captured the psychological, institutional, and economic dimensions of restoration behavior.

Collecting data from mobile pastoralist communities posed a methodological challenge. Because settlements shift spatially and temporally, the 2019 census could not serve as a reliable sampling frame. Instead, the researchers generated 10-metre-resolution land-use and land-cover change maps from fused Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery to identify settled areas, then validated potential homesteads through community consultations with local chiefs and key informants. A fixed allocation of 25 household representatives was drawn from each of seven administrative units, targeting 175 respondents. After 15 refusals and the exclusion of 38 questionnaires with substantial missing data or uniform response patterns, 122 valid observations remained for analysis.

The dependent variable, pro-environmental behavior, was measured on a five-point Likert scale covering actions such as rotational grazing, planting native grasses and trees, reducing livestock density, and investing in fencing, water management, or reseeding. Because extreme categories were sparse, responses were collapsed into three ordinal levels: weak, modest, and strong. Ordinal logistic regression models, estimated by maximum likelihood and validated against an ordered probit specification, assessed how the extended theory constructs influenced behavior. The Brant test confirmed that the proportional odds assumption held in all models.

The results were unambiguous. Response efficacy emerged as the strongest predictor of restoration participation, with a coefficient of 1.629, meaning pastoralists who believe restoration measures actually work are far more likely to engage. Perceived vulnerability followed at 1.203, then self-efficacy at 1.150 and perceived incentives at 0.811. Perceived political willingness also had a significant positive effect at 0.571. In contrast, response costs, the perceived expense, labor burden, and long time lag before benefits materialize, had a significant negative effect, with a coefficient of −0.911 in the baseline model. Notably, perceived severity and the rewards of continuing current practices showed no statistically significant relationship with restoration behavior.

The marginal effects sharpen the picture. A unit increase in response efficacy reduces the probability of weak pro-environmental behavior by roughly 0.109 percentage points while raising the probability of strong behavior by about 0.252 percentage points. A unit increase in response cost does the reverse, shifting pastoralists toward weaker engagement. Perceived incentives and political willingness similarly shift respondents up the behavioral scale. Overall, the study demonstrates that coping appraisal, beliefs about one’s ability and the effectiveness of the response, exerts a greater influence on restoration behavior than threat appraisal, suggesting that awareness campaigns alone are insufficient to trigger sustained action.

Demographic patterns added further nuance. Men constituted 66.4 percent of respondents, reflecting the male-dominated nature of pastoral activities in northern Kenya, though the substantial share of women participants signals a shift toward gender equity in pastoral labor, likely driven by male outmigration and livelihood diversification. Education was strikingly low, with 69.7 percent of respondents lacking formal schooling, and 72.1 percent earning below 5,000 Kenyan shillings monthly. These constraints matter: prior research has identified income limitations as the strongest predictor of non-adoption of restoration practices in arid Kenya, and low literacy complicates engagement with formal instruments such as Land Degradation Neutrality frameworks or payments for ecosystem services.

The significance of perceived political willingness points to the visible role of ongoing initiatives. Projects supported by UNDP and the Global Environment Facility have delivered in situ restoration, training, and in-kind inputs under the Nature and People as One RAMAT model, while The Restoration Initiative, running from 2018 to 2025, provided community capacity building, water-management works, and seeds. Since 2009, county governments and NGOs have also supported Environmental Management Committees responsible for sustainable woody-vegetation harvesting. Pastoralists who observe such tangible government commitment appear more willing to invest their own labor and resources in restoration, reinforcing a virtuous cycle of trust and participation.

The authors argue that their findings provide empirical support for the extended Protection Motivation Theory and carry direct policy implications for achieving Land Degradation Neutrality under Sustainable Development Goal indicator 15.3.1. Restoration policies, they contend, should strengthen local capacity through training and extension services, demonstrate the effectiveness of interventions via pilot sites and demonstration projects, provide appropriate financial and non-financial incentives such as input subsidies and payments for ecosystem services, and reinforce governance support alongside conventional awareness-raising. Because the analysis relies on cross-sectional data from a single pastoral context, the researchers caution that the findings identify associations rather than definitive causal relationships, and they recommend longitudinal designs, Bayesian approaches, and governance-extended structural equation modeling in future work, along with closer study of social networks, risk preferences, and customary institutions that shape collective restoration action.

Subject of Research: Psychological and institutional determinants of pastoralists' participation in rangeland restoration in Marsabit County, Kenya

Article Title: Determinants of pastoralists’ participation in rangeland restoration in Laisamis and Saku sub-counties, Marsabit County, Kenya

Article References: Kahuri, S. K., Kwakwa, P. A., Kumi, S., & Wireko-Gyebi, R. S. (2026). Determinants of pastoralists’ participation in rangeland restoration in Laisamis and Saku sub-counties, Marsabit County, Kenya. Frontiers in Environmental Economics, 5, Article 1861585. https://doi.org/10.3389/frevc.2026.1861585

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frevc.2026.1861585

Keywords: rangeland restoration, pastoralism, Kenya, Protection Motivation Theory, land degradation neutrality, drylands, pro-environmental behavior, ordinal logistic regression, perceived incentives, political willingness, Marsabit County, SDG 15

The study builds on the theory of planned behavior, or TPB, a framework introduced decades ago that has become the workhorse of behavioral psychology research. In its classic form, the theory holds that the single best predictor of whether someone will perform a behavior is their intention to do so, and that intention itself is shaped by three forces: attitude, meaning how favorably the person evaluates the behavior; subjective norms, meaning perceived social pressure from people around them; and perceived behavioral control, meaning how easy or difficult they believe the behavior to be. Researchers have repeatedly extended the model by adding constructs such as environmental knowledge, connectedness to nature, personal norms, and efficacy beliefs. What has remained murky, according to the authors, is how these additions should be theoretically ordered relative to one another, and whether the same extended model applies to different forms of environmental action.

That gap matters because pro-environmental behavior is not a single thing. Saving water in a dormitory shower is a private-sphere act, performed alone and quietly. Attending an environmental club meeting, lobbying a university administration, or participating in a collective campus campaign is public-sphere behavior, socially embedded and dependent on other people. Whether the same psychological pathway leads to both has been an open empirical question, and the new study was designed to answer it directly rather than assume it.

The researchers recruited 806 Chinese university students and administered a survey measuring the full battery of TPB constructs alongside the extended variables. Before testing the structural model, they conducted a pooled exploratory factor analysis combining the private-sphere and public-sphere behavior items. This statistical procedure asks whether items measuring two supposedly distinct behavioral domains actually separate into distinct factors when analyzed together. The result was instructive: the analysis supported two strongly related but empirically recoverable subdomains. In other words, private and public environmental behaviors are correlated enough to sit close together in a person’s behavioral repertoire, yet distinct enough that statistical methods can pull them apart. Students who recycle also tend to participate, but the two tendencies are not the same trait.

The structural model then revealed a clear architecture of distal and proximal influences. At the distal level sit relatively stable cognitive and affective orientations. Environmental knowledge, the study found, was most closely associated with perceived behavioral control. This makes intuitive sense: students who understand the environmental consequences of their actions tend to feel more capable of acting, because knowing what to do is a prerequisite for believing you can do it. Connectedness to nature, by contrast, showed strong associations with attitudinal, social, and moral orientations. Students who feel emotionally bonded to the natural world evaluate green behavior more favorably, perceive more social support for it, and experience stronger personal moral obligations to act. Nature connectedness, in this account, functions less as a direct driver of action and more as a fertile soil from which multiple motivational pathways grow.

At the proximal level, the classical TPB variables did their expected work. Attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control were all positively associated with behavioral intention, confirming that the original triad remains predictive even when richer constructs are added to the model. Personal norms, the internalized sense of moral obligation that echoes early norm-activation theory, added further predictive power. Intention, in turn, emerged as the central hub for both behavioral domains, the conduit through which all the upstream psychological forces funnel into actual behavior. Whatever distal or proximal origins a motivation has, it must pass through intention to become action.

Yet the two behavioral domains did not follow identical routes. Collective efficacy, a person’s belief that a group acting together can achieve environmental goals, provided an additional pathway specifically for public-sphere participation. Private behaviors can be enacted by an individual alone; participating in collective environmental action requires confidence not just in oneself but in the group’s capacity to make a difference. This finding gives collective efficacy a distinctive theoretical position: it is not a general enhancer of all green behavior but a domain-specific enabler of socially participatory action. For universities hoping to mobilize students into campus sustainability movements, cultivating the belief that organized groups can succeed may be as important as cultivating individual motivation.

The methodological choice to use partial least squares structural equation modeling deserves mention. Unlike covariance-based approaches, PLS-SEM is well suited to complex models with multiple constructs and pathways, making it a practical tool for testing extended frameworks like this one. Combined with the pooled factor analysis, the study offered both a confirmatory test of the ordered model and an empirical check on whether its two behavioral outcome domains were genuinely distinct. The convergent results strengthen the case that the observed architecture reflects something real about how environmental motivation is organized in students’ minds rather than an artifact of questionnaire design.

The practical implications are concrete. Because environmental knowledge feeds primarily into perceived behavioral control, sustainability education that stops at raising awareness may be incomplete; students also need the practical skills and perceived ease that convert knowledge into a sense of capability. Because connectedness to nature nourishes attitudes, norms, and moral obligations simultaneously, experiences that foster emotional bonds with nature, from outdoor programs to campus green spaces, could pay dividends across the entire motivational chain. And because collective efficacy uniquely empowers public-sphere engagement, universities need to offer credible structures for collective participation: student environmental organizations with real influence, visible examples of successful group action, and institutional channels through which student voices demonstrably shape campus policy.

The broader significance of the study lies in its integrated account of environmental behavior. Rather than treating pro-environmental action as a monolith driven by a single motive, the findings support a layered model in which distal cognitive and affective orientations relate to more proximal individual mechanisms, intention serves as the shared gateway, and collective agency becomes particularly important precisely when action requires other people. For a generation of students who will live with the consequences of today’s environmental decisions, the study suggests that building green campuses is a two-part engineering problem: equip individuals with the knowledge, moral conviction, and confidence to act alone, and convince them that acting together can actually change the world around them.

Subject of Research: Psychological predictors of private and public campus pro-environmental behavior among Chinese university students using an extended theory of planned behavior

Article Title: An extended TPB approach to examining Chinese university students’ public and private campus pro-environmental behavior

Article References: Chen, X., Huang, X., Liu, Y., Jiang, L., Kumar, J., & Huang, J. (2026). An extended TPB approach to examining Chinese university students’ public and private campus pro-environmental behavior. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05638-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05638-4

Keywords: theory of planned behavior, pro-environmental behavior, campus sustainability, environmental psychology, connectedness to nature, collective efficacy, personal norms, behavioral intention, PLS-SEM, Chinese university students, private-sphere behavior, public-sphere behavior

The article, written by Julia Peavey and Alexandra Hill, both third-year students at William and Mary, focuses on what psychologists call emerging adults, people between the ages of 18 and 25. In Western societies, the authors argue, the lives of this age group are increasingly structured and digital, producing a growing dissociation from nature. College students today experience an urbanized, technological world that limits direct exposure to natural spaces while heightening awareness of ecological degradation. The result, they write, is a dual burden: a feeling of separation from global ecological systems and anxiety about the future.

That dissociation matters for health as well as for identity. Spending time in natural spaces has been extensively linked to improvements in mental and physical health, and even brief periods of exposure to campus green spaces have been shown to alleviate stress and promote well-being in college students. Students actively seek out green spaces to reduce stress and report wishing they had more time outdoors and in study spaces with natural elements. But the authors point to a technical distinction that shapes how much benefit students actually receive: conscious feelings of connection with nature enhance the well-being effects of green-space exposure. Nature relatedness, a measure of the strength of one’s personal connection to the natural world, significantly moderates affective, behavioral, and even electrophysiological markers of nature exposure. In other words, the top-down attribution of meaning and selfhood to nature shapes the bottom-up sensory responses of students in green spaces.

To explain why this matters, the authors draw on the deep ecology theory of philosopher Arne Naess, which moves away from a shallow, anthropocentric worldview toward a relational view in which humans are one with nature. Naess described the realization of the ecological self, a sense of identification with planetary ecosystems, as a process particularly relevant for emerging adults. Nisbet and colleagues, who developed the nature relatedness scale, describe ecological selfhood as our sense of identification with planetary ecosystems, and the authors argue it may be the basis of cultivating non-material, community-based sources of well-being. Identifying with ecological systems also contributes to pro-environmental behavior, meaning that personal health derived from time in nature is symbiotic with planetary health. To neglect the environment, the authors write, is to neglect ourselves.

The technical question is what kinds of experiences can build this identification. The authors note that environmental education alone does not significantly increase nature connectedness, but interventions involving contact with nature and mindfulness practices do. Deep ecology theorists posit that identification with nature necessitates an experiential component that natural sciences often exclude. Learning about ecological systems through Western pedagogical frameworks, which often impart the illusion of an isolated self rather than cultivating relational connectedness, is not enough. Passive exposure to green spaces is also insufficient. Emotional, embodied, in-nature experiences, the authors argue, are necessary for students to truly see themselves as nature.

Their proposed mechanism is play. Van Vleet and Feeney define play as an activity carried out for amusement and fun, approached with an enthusiastic and in-the-moment attitude, and highly interactive. Nature play refers to the embodied experience of unstructured play in natural settings, in which nature itself can act as a play partner. The evidence base for play in children is strong: outdoor play improves physical health, attention, self-control, and cognitive development, encourages symbolic play that promotes abstract thinking, and green spaces enhance these benefits by facilitating more creative and cooperative play. In college-aged adults, playfulness is linked to lower levels of perceived stress and heightened resilience. Yet studies of adult play, particularly in natural settings, remain limited.

The barriers to adult play are both social and structural. Unstructured play can be perceived as embarrassing and contrary to adults’ traditional social roles, reducing its commonality. Play designers largely overlook the needs and interests of adults, catering outdoor recreation spaces to children. Structured activities like sports leagues are often the most accessible and least stigmatized play options for adults, despite the superior health benefits derived from unstructured play. Even so, a survey by Rhea and colleagues found that adults prefer unstructured, outdoor play activities. Concerningly, outdoor unstructured play is also becoming less common for children with the rise of structured schedules and electronic time, meaning today’s college students often have stunted experiences of childhood play and must learn to reap the benefits of play as they transition into adulthood.

The theoretical grounding for why play in nature specifically builds identity comes from phenomenology. Skår and colleagues connect Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception, which argues that humans make meaning through concrete sensory experiences with their surroundings, to nature play. They posit that nature play, as an embodied experience, is a powerful means to integrate oneself in nature and integrate nature into one’s self. Through tactile play experiences in natural settings, children can identify with local places and avoid dissociation from nature, and outdoor play develops a sense of environmental competency contributing to environmental identity development. Outdoor recreation may also increase pro-environmental behaviors and attitudes in adults, particularly when it involves reflection on relationships between humans and non-human nature. Identifying with natural spaces through play may therefore encourage care and a sense of responsibility for these spaces.

The authors’ argument is informed by their own experience in an ecotherapy course at William and Mary, in which class time included experientials, opportunities for nature immersion in which students abandoned the usual classroom to explore a different theme each week. During the nature play experiential, the class met in an unassuming grassy area behind a residence hall, next to a vegetable garden and opening onto a stretch of woods. A student facilitator emphasized that the assignment to express themselves through play was open-ended and judgment-free. After the instruction to go, the class hesitated and shuffled awkwardly until one student tagged a classmate. The games invented were easy to join and start conversations about, offering opportunities to connect with new people, and the elevated mood lasted for the rest of the day. Most significantly, the experience grounded future interactions with non-human nature in curiosity, appreciation, and attention to detail, forcing the adoption of a perspective of childlike wonder.

College campuses, the authors argue, are particularly formative spaces for shaping perspective, identity, and belonging in emerging adults, and belonging plays an essential role in fostering well-being in college students. They conclude with three practical recommendations aligned with Campus Nature Rx, a nationwide network of over 100 member institutions that promotes engagement with campus environments as a low-cost, high-return mode of improving student well-being. First, they propose time-based challenge activities modeled on Canada’s 30×30 Nature Challenge, in which adults spend 30 minutes outside per day during May, along with scavenger hunts, nature bingo, and group volunteer activities such as litter pick-ups and tree planting. Second, they call for curricula that incorporate nature exposure and nature play activities during and outside of class time, guided by existing Nature Rx and ecotherapy-based courses. Third, they recommend integrating nature play into existing park prescription models, adding loose play objects such as balls, frisbees, and stepping stones to green spaces, and labeling places as ideal for play on campus maps, thus recognizing the possibility of play for emerging adults and alleviating societal expectations that typically associate unstructured play with childhood. The authors acknowledge challenges, including the need for coordinated staff and volunteers, reliable access to green spaces on dense urban campuses, and considerations of safety, though they note that some risk of injury constitutes healthy risk-taking with developmental value. While the practice of nature play only begins to address the structural changes necessary to remedy the othering of nature in anthropocentric societies, they write, it offers meaningful experiences for individuals seeking to reintegrate themselves in nature. With a mindset of spontaneity, enjoyment, and gratitude, nature becomes an expansive playground that students may interact with, care for, and identify as.

Subject of Research: Conservation Science

Article Title: Fallen tree trunks became balancing beams: nature play as a means for emerging adults to identify with ecological systems

Article References: Peavey, J., & Hill, A. (2026). Fallen tree trunks became balancing beams: nature play as a means for emerging adults to identify with ecological systems. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 7, Article 1907735. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2026.1907735

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcosc.2026.1907735

Keywords: nature play, emerging adults, college students, ecological self, Campus Nature Rx, biophilia, nature connectedness, student well-being, deep ecology, green spaces, environmental identity, pro-environmental behavior

The study, published in Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, was conducted by economist Lea Cassar, economist Tim Michael Neu, and psychologist Petra Jansen. With financial support from a large German health insurer, the team offered a free eight-week online mindfulness course to students at the University of Regensburg in the 2024 summer term. Because not all applicants could be accommodated, the 304 eligible respondents were randomly assigned in equal numbers to a treatment group that received the course and a control group that received nothing, using a re-randomization procedure to ensure the groups were balanced on baseline characteristics. The study was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework before the intervention began, and outcomes were measured twice—once at application and once a week after the course ended—allowing powerful within-subject comparisons.

The course itself was no throwaway wellness webinar. It consisted of eight live 90-minute Zoom sessions led by two certified teachers, with groups of roughly thirty participants each. The first four sessions drew on the well-established Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, combining formal sitting meditation, body awareness, and mindful movement. Sessions five and six were based on the Mindful Self-Compassion curriculum, the seventh on Rick Hanson’s neuroplasticity training, and the eighth integrated elements from MBSR, self-compassion practice, and the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, with a deliberate emphasis on connectedness. Participants completed weekly homework, often recording and uploading videos of fifteen to twenty minutes of meditation. Attendance averaged 63.6 percent across the weeks, and 71.2 percent of treated students attended at least four sessions.

The researchers’ central hypothesis was that mindfulness training would spill over into socially relevant economic behavior. Their theoretical framework held that increases in mindfulness improve mental health and strengthen connectedness—to oneself, to others, and to nature—which in turn should make people behave in more environmentally friendly ways and distribute income more equally. Crucially, rather than relying on attitude questionnaires, which dominate this literature and are vulnerable to social desirability bias, the team measured actual behavior with incentivized tasks in which real money and real carbon dioxide reductions were at stake.

The pro-environmental measures were inventive. In a certificate game, students bid from a 100-euro endowment for a genuine CO2 certificate from the EU Emissions Trading System, worth 100 euros and permitting 1.2 tons of emissions; winning bidders saw their certificates retired, while their unspent money was paid out—creating a real trade-off between planetary and personal gain. A travel lottery forced choices between flight and train vouchers of varying values, capturing willingness to forgo money for lower-emission transport. A product choice task measured whether students would exert costly effort, decoding product labels, to identify and select the environmentally friendly option. Distributive preferences were measured with a fairness allocation game in which participants acted as impartial spectators, dividing a 30-euro wage between two real Prolific crowdworkers who differed in productivity, so that fairness views could be separated from self-interest. Survey measures of climate and redistribution policy preferences rounded out the battery.

On its own terms, the intervention worked. Mindfulness, measured with the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, rose by roughly 0.24 to 0.38 standard deviations relative to the control group, depending on the statistical specification, a highly significant effect. The secondary psychological outcomes told a partly encouraging story: perceived stress fell by about 0.28 standard deviations, self-compassion increased by about 0.37 standard deviations, and connectedness to nature improved by around 0.23 standard deviations. But flourishing and connectedness to others were untouched, meaning the hypothesized mediating channels were only selectively activated.

When the researchers turned to behavior, the expected cascade of change never materialized. Across the three environmental tasks, the point estimates were positive—between 0.03 and 0.26 standard deviations—but none reached statistical significance in the endline or value-added models, and the pattern did not hold consistently across specifications. Policy preferences on climate protection versus economic growth, government climate action, reducing inequality versus growth, and progressive taxation were likewise unaffected, with consistently positive but insignificant coefficients. The fairness allocation game showed no treatment effect in aggregate or in any of its individual stages, in which one worker’s performance ranged from one percent to more than one hundred percent better than the other’s. In short, students who became measurably more mindful, more self-compassionate, and more connected to nature did not become measurably greener or more egalitarian in anything they actually did or endorsed.

Why did meaningful psychological change fail to translate into behavioral change? One candidate explanation is selection. Participation was voluntary, and the course attracted a self-selected, predominantly female sample—about 81 percent women, against roughly 61 percent in the university’s student body overall—over-representing humanities students. Prior research shows that women tend, on average, to hold stronger pro-environmental and redistributive preferences, and the baseline data confirmed it: 80.9 percent of participants bid at least 50 euros in the CO2 game, about 70 percent already prioritized climate action and inequality reduction over economic growth, and 86.3 percent said higher earners should pay a larger share of their income in taxes. The course, in other words, may have recruited precisely the people whose behavior it was hoped to change, leaving almost no headroom for improvement. Yet post-stratification weighting to match the university’s gender composition produced nearly identical estimates, suggesting selection alone cannot explain the null results.

Alternative explanations point to dosage and mechanism. Moderation analyses found that students whose psychological gains were largest did not show stronger behavioral effects, which argues against the idea that the channels were simply too weakly activated for some individuals. However, exploratory analyses splitting participants by attendance hint at a dose-response pattern: high attenders showed marginally significant positive effects on several environmental outcomes and larger psychological improvements, while low attenders showed none. This pattern is observational and open to endogeneity concerns, but it suggests that a more intense or in-person intervention might yet move behavior. The authors also note that the randomized incentive structure produced modest expected payouts, though social desirability bias, had it operated, would presumably have inflated rather than suppressed treatment effects.

The broader implications are uncomfortable for a popular narrative. Much of the existing literature linking mindfulness to pro-environmental attitudes and prosociality rests on cross-sectional correlations or self-reported intentions; the small number of randomized studies with incentivized outcomes, including a recent trial finding that mindfulness training actually reduced preferences for pro-environmental outcomes, paints a far more cautious picture. This study—one of the largest and best-controlled to date, combining live instruction, a real-world health insurance partnership, and hard behavioral measures—supports that caution. Mindfulness programs remain relatively cheap, scalable, and genuinely effective at reducing stress and enhancing well-being, and those benefits are not in question. But the hope that meditation can quietly serve as climate policy or redistribution policy in disguise is, for now, unsupported. If societies want citizens to fly less, pay for emissions reductions, or back progressive taxation, the evidence suggests they will need to appeal to something other than eight weeks of breathing exercises.

Subject of Research: Effects of mindfulness training on pro-environmental and distributive behavior in a randomized controlled trial

Article Title: From mental well-being to pro-environmental and distributive behavior? Evidence from a randomized mindfulness intervention

Article References: Cassar, L., Neu, T. M., & Jansen, P. (2026). From mental well-being to pro-environmental and distributive behavior? Evidence from a randomized mindfulness intervention. Frontiers in Behavioral Economics, 5, Article 1875793. https://doi.org/10.3389/frbhe.2026.1875793

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frbhe.2026.1875793

Keywords: mindfulness, randomized controlled trial, pro-environmental behavior, distributive preferences, mental health, behavioral economics, climate policy, self-compassion, connectedness to nature, university students, stress reduction, spillover effects

The study’s methodology was unusually rigorous for survey research of this kind. The team designed a structured questionnaire with three sections: twenty-one questions probing environmental awareness, twenty-four questions examining environmental behavior, and a third section recording demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. All attitude questions used a five-point Likert scale running from strongly disagree to strongly agree, while behavior questions ran from never to very often. Before deployment, the instrument was refined through a pilot study with twenty randomly selected citizens, whose responses were excluded from the final analysis. Data collection took place in 2024 across 160 Greek cities, spanning metropolitan areas, medium-sized and small cities, and islands, with questionnaires gathered roughly half face-to-face and half by telephone.

The sampling strategy was equally deliberate. Using stratified and simple random sampling, the researchers collected questionnaires in different parts of each city at different times of day and on different days of the week, respecting national ratios of sex, age, and education drawn from the Hellenic Statistical Authority. Although 1,440 questionnaires were collected, only the 1,410 fully completed forms were retained, yielding a margin of error of just 2.61 percent. A formal representativeness test against the 2021 Census confirmed that the sample mirrored the adult Greek population in gender, age group, marital status, number of children, education, and professional status, though the authors caution that representativeness was assessed only for these specified characteristics.

The analytical framework distinguished between indicators calculated at the level of the whole sample and indicators calculated for each individual respondent. Four specific sample-level indicators captured awareness of water pollution, air pollution, climate change, and waste management, with four matching indicators for behavior, plus two aggregate indicators averaging across all four issues. At the individual level, the team computed ten specific and aggregate indicators plus a global individual indicator combining awareness and behavior across all domains. Statistical tests, including independent-sample t-tests and one-way ANOVA with Tukey and Scheffé post-hoc comparisons, then probed how demographic and socioeconomic characteristics shaped these scores.

The headline numbers are telling. Air pollution topped the awareness ranking with a mean score of 3.68, followed by waste management at 3.49, climate change at 3.30, and water pollution at 3.26. Yet the behavior ranking flipped almost entirely: water pollution led at 3.48, followed by climate change and waste management, both at 3.30, with air pollution collapsing to 2.53, the lowest score in the entire study. In other words, the issue Greeks worry about most, driven by vehicle emissions, industry, and biomass burning in their cities, is the one where they least often take protective action such as using public transport, carpooling, or avoiding products like tobacco, insecticides, and pesticides.

Plotted against each other, the four awareness and behavior scores reveal a negative trend: the higher a population’s awareness of an issue, the lower its corresponding behavior tends to fall. This pattern echoes a well-documented phenomenon in environmental psychology known as the value-action gap, the difference between what people say and what they do. The aggregate indicators crystallize the discrepancy. The aggregate awareness indicator stood at 3.43, while aggregate behavior lagged at 3.15. Citizens, the authors conclude, largely know what should be done for the environment, but knowledge alone does not translate into intention or action, with socio-psychological and practical factors intervening at every step.

Yet the individual-level analysis complicates the picture in an intriguing way. When awareness and behavior were regressed against each other for each respondent, the relationship turned strongly positive and linear for all four issues, with coefficients of determination all exceeding 0.90. For water pollution the slope was 1.0290, for climate change 0.9775, for waste management 0.9218, and for air pollution 0.6793. This means that at the individual level, awareness is a highly reliable predictor of behavior, even though the population-level pattern shows behavior consistently trailing awareness. The two findings are not contradictory: individuals who are more aware do act more, but nearly everyone acts less than their stated concern would predict.

The frequency distributions add texture. For air pollution, 51.13 percent of respondents agreed they were aware of the issue and 30.43 percent strongly agreed, yet 29.93 percent reported acting pro-environmentally only rarely and 43.62 percent only sometimes. For waste management, nearly half of respondents reported often acting pro-environmentally, but the authors note that Greek citizens remain insufficiently informed despite recent legislation, including Law 4819/2021 introducing Pay-As-You-Throw systems and European directives targeting a reduction of municipal landfilling to 10 percent by 2035. For climate change, awareness and behavior sat at identical levels of 3.30, which the researchers interpret as a shared failure to grasp both the causes of climate change and the urgency of responding to it, possibly because Greece’s warm Mediterranean climate makes some impacts feel distant.

Demographic patterns emerged with statistical significance. Citizens without children scored higher on awareness of water pollution (3.33 versus 3.20), climate change (3.55 versus 3.43), and waste management (3.55 versus 3.43), as well as on the aggregate awareness indicator and the global indicator. Unmarried respondents outperformed married ones on both climate change awareness (4.24 versus 3.92) and climate behavior (3.33 versus 2.64). Residents outside Athens showed greater awareness of waste management and a higher global indicator than those inside the capital, where roughly a third of Greeks live. Income, education, and employment status, by contrast, showed no significant correlations, a finding that challenges assumptions about wealth and schooling as drivers of environmental engagement.

The authors are careful to situate their results within the Greek and Mediterranean context. Environmental awareness and behavior vary considerably across countries, shaped by cultural values, institutional trust, environmental education, and the visibility of local problems. Northern Europeans, for instance, generally report higher concern and more frequent sustainable behavior, partly reflecting longer-established environmental policies. Still, the researchers argue that the indicator framework itself, integrating natural and anthropogenic dimensions across social, economic, and political parameters, is likely transferable to other Mediterranean countries facing similar pressures from climate change, water scarcity, urban air pollution, tourism, and waste. Future comparative studies, they suggest, should test the external validity of these indicators across Europe and track how awareness and behavior evolve over time.

For policymakers, the message is sobering but actionable. Awareness campaigns alone, the study implies, will not close the gap, because awareness is already high where behavior is weakest. Instead, interventions should target practical barriers, strengthen personal responsibility, and promote engagement through environmental education, community initiatives, recycling programs, energy-saving incentives, and sustainable transport options. The paradox at the heart of the data, that the best-informed citizens act least on the issue they know best, suggests that information is only the first step in a much longer chain linking knowledge to habit. Bridging that chain, the authors conclude, will require mobilizing citizens not merely to understand environmental problems but to change the daily routines that sustain them.

Subject of Research: Quantitative indicators of environmental awareness and behavior among Greek citizens

Article Title: Quantification of environmental awareness and behavior using indicators

Article References: Gareiou, Z., & Zervas, E. (2026). Quantification of environmental awareness and behavior using indicators. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101552. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101552

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101552

Keywords: environmental awareness, pro-environmental behavior, value-action gap, Greece, survey indicators, air pollution, water pollution, climate change, waste management, Likert scale, demographic factors, environmental policy

The research team, led by Lei Wang with colleagues Xiaowei Zhang, Xiaofang Wang, and Deqing Jia, framed their investigation around a well-established model in communication science known as the O-S-R-O-R framework. In this orientation-stimulus-reasoning-orientation-reasoning model, communication is not treated as a simple one-way injection of information. Instead, media messages serve as stimuli that interact with an individual’s existing orientations, such as values and prior attitudes, and trigger reasoning processes that shape subsequent orientations and, ultimately, behavior. Applied to environmental politics, the framework predicts that what people watch, read, and scroll through should influence not only whether they act against pollution but also how they choose to act.

The empirical foundation for the study is the 2021 wave of the Chinese General Social Survey, one of the country’s most comprehensive ongoing social science data collection efforts. The survey captures detailed information about respondents’ media habits, their understanding of environmental policies, and their participation in activities aimed at curbing pollution. Crucially, the researchers distinguished between two broad categories of engagement. Institutional anti-pollution action includes participation through official structures, such as contacting authorities, contributing to formal consultations, or supporting government-led environmental initiatives. Non-institutional action encompasses channels outside official structures, including protest activities and other forms of collective mobilization that operate independently of the state.

The statistical analysis revealed a clear division of labor between old and new media. People who consumed more traditional media were significantly more likely to engage in institutional anti-pollution action. When the researchers tested whether policy knowledge explained this link, they found evidence of full mediation: the entire association between traditional media use and formal participation flowed through respondents’ grasp of environmental policy. In other words, watching the news or reading a newspaper does not appear to push people directly toward official channels. Rather, it equips them with the policy literacy that makes such participation possible and meaningful.

New media told a different story. Heavier use of digital platforms was positively associated with non-institutional anti-pollution action, consistent with the idea that social networks and online communities lower the barriers to collective, informal mobilization. Yet policy knowledge did not mediate this relationship. The connection between scrolling through feeds and joining informal action appears to operate through other mechanisms, perhaps the rapid spread of grievance narratives, the visibility of collective sentiment, or the social reinforcement that online platforms provide. Whatever the precise channel, the finding suggests that digital media mobilize without necessarily educating.

This asymmetry carries theoretical weight. Communication scholars have long debated whether the internet fragments public discourse or enriches it, and whether online engagement substitutes for or complements traditional civic participation. The Chinese data support a picture in which the two media ecosystems cultivate different repertoires of action. Traditional media, with their editorial gatekeeping and closer alignment with official information flows, appear to function as conduits for policy-relevant knowledge that channels citizens toward recognized institutional avenues. New media, with their participatory architecture and viral dynamics, seem to facilitate direct mobilization that bypasses the knowledge-intensive route.

The study did not treat the population as a monolith. A heterogeneity analysis examined whether the effects of media use differed across demographic and social groups, and it found meaningful variation along lines of age, education, and social trust. This matters because the same media environment can have very different civic consequences depending on who is consuming it. For younger, more educated citizens who are already fluent in digital navigation, new media may amplify existing tendencies toward informal engagement. For groups with higher social trust, media messages may reinforce confidence in official channels, strengthening institutional participation. The findings imply that media effects on environmental action are conditional rather than uniform, shaped by the social location of the audience.

Why does policy knowledge act as such a powerful bridge for traditional media? One plausible interpretation lies in the nature of institutional participation itself. Filing an environmental complaint, responding to a policy consultation, or engaging with local authorities requires knowing which rules apply, which agencies hold jurisdiction, and what rights citizens can invoke. Traditional media in China, operating within a structured information environment, tend to cover policy developments, regulatory campaigns, and official environmental targets in depth. This coverage builds precisely the cognitive toolkit that institutional action demands. Without that knowledge, the willingness to act may exist but find no productive outlet, which helps explain why the direct association between traditional media use and formal participation disappears once policy knowledge is accounted for.

The authors draw practical conclusions from these patterns. They highlight the importance of traditional media in supporting what they describe as rational and stable engagement, suggesting that these outlets remain valuable infrastructure for channeling environmental concern into orderly civic participation. At the same time, they argue that stronger regulation of new media is needed, framing such regulation as a way to reduce protest activities and safeguard social stability. This recommendation reflects the study’s finding that digital platforms are associated with non-institutional action that operates outside formal channels, and it situates the research within broader policy debates about information governance and platform oversight.

For environmental governance more broadly, the study underscores a point that extends well beyond China: pollution is not only a technical problem but a participation problem. Effective environmental protection increasingly depends on citizens acting beyond their private habits of recycling or conserving energy, engaging instead in public action that pressures firms and shapes policy. The media environment through which people learn about pollution therefore becomes part of the governance system itself. If different platforms cultivate different forms of engagement, then the design of environmental communication, the regulation of digital spaces, and the accessibility of institutional participation channels all interact to determine whether public concern about pollution hardens into formal advocacy, informal protest, or nothing at all. The Chinese survey evidence offers a detailed empirical map of that interaction, showing that the road from media use to environmental action is not single but forked, and that policy knowledge marks the path toward the institutional branch.

Subject of Research: How traditional and new media use shape institutional and non-institutional anti-pollution participation in China

Article Title: Media use and anti-pollution action: Empirical evidence from 2021 Chinese General Social Survey

Article References: Wang, L., Zhang, X., Wang, X., & Jia, D. (2026). Media use and anti-pollution action: Empirical evidence from 2021 Chinese General Social Survey. PLOS One, 21(10), e0360300. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360300

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360300

Keywords: media use, environmental pollution, pro-environmental behavior, policy knowledge, Chinese General Social Survey, institutional participation, non-institutional participation, O-S-R-O-R framework, traditional media, new media, social trust, environmental governance