Teaching pro-environmental rules: Implications for environmental education and climate change

Abstract

The concern regarding the gap between words and actions has spread through different contexts, in particular those relating to environmental education. Despite repeated warnings about the damaging impact of human behaviour on the environment and the effect of actions undertaken to teach people to protect the environment (pro-environmental behaviours), there have been few advances in relation to favourable responses from people’s actions. The alternatives proposed in environmental education to reduce this gap include research relating to teaching pro-environmental rules and its impact on human behaviour. Rule learning poses challenges for the comprehension of human behaviour, especially for environmental education in general and climate change in particular as well as being proposed as an epistemological and theoretical approach to human behaviour insofar as it differs from the established approach in physiological, medical, attitudinal, cognitive, or motivational mediation models that explain behaviour on the basis of factors that are internal to the individual. This article discusses the origins, genetic or environmental [Chomsky (1959) vs. Skinner (1957, 1981)], of verbal behaviour with regards to its origin and development in ontogenesis. Afterwards, it considers the notion of rule-governed behaviour with the definitions and different taxonomies that have been proposed regarding rules, as well as the variables associated with (in) sensitivity to following them and the possible alternative approaches for each of the (in)sensitivity factors identified. Finally, it analyses the role of education in pro-environmental rules for regulating people’s own behaviour and in the design of macro- and metacontingencies to incentivise environmental protection in large human groups.

Keywords

• pro-environmental behaviour
• universal grammar
• verbal regulation
• rules-governed behaviour
• environmental education