Purity And Environmental Concern

Attitudes about climate change and carbon footprints show strong regional patterning. Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi and colleagues investigated the role of moral values in these geographic patterns. The authors used Moral Foundations Theory, which posits that moral judgements emerge from deeply held intuitions about care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. The authors used opinion surveys, comprising 12,061 respondents, conducted from 2008–2013 that measured beliefs regarding the reality, human causation, and negative impacts of climate change, as well as estimates of household carbon footprint provided by UC Berkeley CoolClimate Network. This data was compared with 106,465 responses to the Moral Foundations Questionnaire collected between 2012 and 2018, data from presidential elections, and other demographic data. All analyses were conducted at the county-level. Counties emphasizing fairness norms had 1.06 times higher odds of favoring green practices. Counties with high levels of education had 1.05 times higher odds of favoring green practices. Counties emphasizing purity norms had 1.02 times higher odds of favoring green practices. Among all predictors, a county's political leaning has the strongest influence on the prevalence of green attitudes, with fairness norms ranking as the second strongest predictor. The strongest predictor of household carbon footprint, however, was an emphasis on purity norms, which is often regarded as a conservative value. According to the authors, in a liberal context, purity norms may be expressed as an obligation to keep the Earth pure and untainted.