A Study On The Influencing Factors Of Public Environmental Behavior And Its Mechanism

The natural environment is a necessary condition for the survival of mankind.In recent years,China has broken out the haze frequently and a variety of environmental pollution is not uncommon.The environmental problems have become serious issues that trouble people’s lives and affect people’s health.And the environmental problems are the objective result of people’s bad environmental behavior in the final analysis.It is worth exploring the influencing factors of environmental behavior and analyzing their impact mechanism.In this paper,we use CGSS2010 environmental data to explore two parts: First,to find the individual and structural factors that affect the public environmental behavior from the perspective of individual and structure.Secondly,to analyze the interaction mechanism between the influencing factors and grasp the logic of their influence on public environmental behavior.According to the average cost intensity of behavior,the environmental behavior in private sphere is classified as low-cost and high-cost of it.On the basis of the theory of value-belief-norm(VBN)and planned behavior(TPB),this study constructs the analysis framework of public environmental behavior.Based on the results of multiple linear regression and path analysis,the following conclusions can be drawn.(1)Low-cost and high-cost environmental behavior have the same individual influencing factors and differentiated structural factors,and the same factors affect the path of consistency.In the aspect of individual factors,"ecological world view","environmental hazard consciousness","perceived ability of environmental behavior","responsibility of environmental behavior","willingness to pay","environmental knowledge","media use","environmental concern" and "environmental sensitivity" have positively direct and indirect effects on two types of environmental behaviors.The added variable of "consumerist values" both impact them negatively.After controlling other variables,"post-materialistic values" has no effect on the two types of environmental behavior.In terms of structural factors,residents in the eastern region have better behavior performance than those in the central and western regions,and urban residents are more involved in environmental behavior than rural residents.The "environmental governance of local government" has a significant impact on low-cost environmental behavior.There are no differences of the environmental behavior in the different classes.(2)The same factors have different impact on the diverse costs of environmental behavior."Ecological world view","perceived ability of environmental behavior","responsibility of environmental behavior","willingness to pay","environmental concern","environmental knowledge","media use" and "account type" have stronger impact on high-cost environmental behavior.However,"Environmental hazard consciousness","post-materialistic values","environmental sensitivity" and "eastern region" influence it weakly,indicating that their impact on environmental behavior will be affected by the situation of cost.Apart from the "consumerism values" have a significantly greater impact on low-cost environmental behavior,the variables of environmental attitude such as "ecological world view","environmental hazard consciousness","environmental concerns" and "environmental sensitivity" do not have this impact.The Low-cost hypothesis has not been confirmed in this study.(3)The determinants of low-cost and high-cost environmental behavior are different."Environmental concern","environmental knowledge" and "responsibility of environmental behavior" are common determinants of the two types of environmental behavior.Low-cost environmental behavior also depends on the "eastern region" and "consumerism values",and high-cost environmental behavior is also influenced by "willingness to pay","media use","perceived ability of environmental behavior" and "account type".(4)Structural factors mainly influence the low-cost and high-cost environmental behavior directly.Whereas individual factors not only have direct impacts on two types of environmental behaviors,but also have significantly indirect effects.The formation logic of public environmental behavior in our country can be understood as follows: it is under the joint action of individual factors and structural factors.On the one hand,the two factors directly affect the environmental behavior.On the other hand,their indirect effects are realized by taking a series of causal chain relations based on the "ecological world view" as the starting point,taking the "environmental hazard consciousness","perceived ability of environmental behavior","responsibility of environmental behavior","willingness to pay" to make the intermediate variables.The model formed by the combination of the theory of value-belief-norm(VBN)and planned behavior(TPB)has better explained public environmental behavior in this study,which provides a reference for future environmental behavior research and related policy formulation.