Page 86 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

Chapter 6
Psychological Aspects of Sustainability

Communication

Lenelis Kruse

Abstract A psychological view of sustainability communication opens up three
perspectives. First, it deals with the social and societal construction of complex
concepts like ‘environment’, ‘nature’ or ‘sustainable development’, which is realized
through both direct and mediated communication; second it analyses (global)
human-environment problems and their systemic interrelations hips, which elude
immediate sensory perception and depend on visual and verbal communication;
and, finally, it focuses on communication, which is an important tool to stimulate
mankind to adopt sustainable behaviour patterns.

Keywords Environmental psychology • Sustainable behaviour • Perception of
global environmental change • Gap between awareness and action

Environment, Nature and Sustainable Development
as Social and Cultural Constructs

From the viewpoint of psychology – that is, environmental psychology – the problem
is how to influence and modify non-sustainable behaviour patterns together with
those factors on which they are based, such as values, attitudes, knowledge, motiva-
tion, habits, social norms, as well as the structural or contextual conditions of such
behaviour. From this broad definition of a psychology focused on issues of sustain-
ability, it becomes clear that such program of behavioural change includes and
requires much more than communication alone. It also becomes clear that psychol-
ogy alone cannot accomplish this. A long list of other human science disciplines

L. Kruse (*)
Psychological Institute, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: Lenelis.Kruse@psychologie.uni-heidelberg.de

J. Godemann and G. Michelsen (eds.), Sustainability Communication: Interdisciplinary 69
Perspectives and Theoretical Foundations, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-1697-1_6,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011