Actively Caring for the Environment: An Integration of Behaviorism and Humanism. Special Issue: Litter control and Recycling

Integrates perspectives from behavior-based psychology (BBP) and person-based psychology (PBP) to summarize ways to protect the environment. Community-based interventions are needed to decrease environment-destructive behaviors and to increase environment-protective behaviors. Intervention agents are needed to implement these interventions on a large scale, and this requires people to "actively care" enough to emit other-directed behaviors for environmental protection. Person factors that influence one's propensity to actively care include self-esteem, belongingness, self-efficacy, personal control, and optimism and are described in a model. PBP defines the states or expectancies needed in people to increase their willingness to actively care for the environment, and BBP offers the technology for changing behaviors and attitudes (including actively caring person states).