Adding native plants to home landscapes: The roles of attitudes, social norms, and situational strength

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2020.101519Get rights and content

Highlights

  • New measure of native plant attitudes gives nuanced insight into behavior.

  • Situational strength informs when attitudes and norms play stronger or weaker roles.

  • Results provide tools for researchers and practitioners from a range of disciplines.

Introduction

Over the last 60 years, millions of Americans have migrated from rural areas and densely populated cities to newly developed suburbs (Squires, 2002). These residential landscapes occupy what were once habitats for diverse native plants and animal species — essential actors in the ecosystems that we and other life forms depend upon for survival. Because the typical suburban landscape, which consists of resource intensive grasses and exotic plants, does not support the biodiversity necessary to maintain healthy ecosystems, many forms of wildlife are in danger of extinction and, indeed, dramatic decreases in bird and insect populations have been observed (McKinney, 2002; Tallamy, 2009). Researchers, policymakers, and NGOs have recognized that ecologically sustainable residential landscaping can mitigate the environmentally damaging effects of human behavior in suburban settings and restore ecosystem health (Goddard, Dougill, & Benton, 2013; McKinney, 2002). Introducing native plants into landscapes is a potent and strategic contributor to sustainable residential landscaping because it helps to restore ecosystem functions, increase biodiversity, provide habitats for wildlife, sequester carbon, and mitigate air and water pollution (Burghardt Tallamy, & Shriver, 2009; Goddard et al., 2013; McKinney, 2002; Tallamy, 2009).

The present research advances understanding of homeowner's intentions to plant native plants by applying a fundamental social psychological principle that behavior is expressed as a function of the person and situation (Lewin, 1939; Snyder & Ickes, 1985). As suggested by Nassauer (1995), key person drivers are likely people's attitudes about native plants. Therefore, increasing the native plant population as a means to improve biodiversity and ecosystem health may be enabled by better understanding such attitudes, a key goal of the present work. Second, as suggested by research on pro-environmental behaviors (Cialdini, 2003; Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein, & Griskevicius, 2007; Carrico, Fraser, & Bazuin, 2013) key situational drivers are likely the perceived neighborhood social norms for planting native plants. Third, as research on the power of situations to drive behaviors indicates (Meyer, Dalal, & Hermida, 2010; Meyer et al., 2009, 2014) whether attitudes or perceived norms influences behaviors may depend upon the relative strength of situations in which the behavior occurs: If situational influences are strong, people may be more likely to follow norms for that situation but if situations are weak, then attitudes may direct their behaviors. The present work provides a nuanced understanding how social pressures and personal attitudes influence sustainable residential land use decisions such as adding native plants.

Although a common lay belief is that native plants are messy and unattractive (Nassauer, 1995), recent research suggests an emergence of positive attitudes about native plants. Early research highlights preferences for traditional, neat, and ecologically deficient landscapes (Nassauer, 1993, 1995; Williams & Cary, 2002). Yet more recent research suggests that people like the appearance of landscapes that include a large proportion of native plants (Davis, Chappell, & Schwevens, 2012; Fischer, Selge, Van Der Wal, & Larson, 2014; Hurd, St. Hilaire, & White, 2006; Kurz & Baudains, 2012; Larsen & Harlan, 2006; Peterson et al., 2012). Three case studies in the United States have demonstrated that residents prefer landscapes that consist mostly of native plants as compared to traditional landscapes (Hurd, St.Hilaire, & White, 2006; Peterson et al., 2012; Zagdegan, Behe, & Gough, 2008). Some research has also found that people are willing to pay more for native plants if they are labeled as native (Yue, Hurley, & Anderson, 2011) and spend more on landscapes with native plants compared to traditional lawns, if the landscapes are “well-designed” (Helfand, Park, Nassauer, & Kosek, 2006).

Research in other countries has more directly assessed views about native plants with some research examining the relation between these views and landscape preferences. Members of the Canadian and UK public think that native plants are beautiful, beneficial to the economy, beneficial to nature, and easily controllable (Fischer et al., 2014). As such, these qualities may be important facets of attitudes about native plants. Another study in Australia found that more positive attitudes predicted preferences for ‘high habitat’ landscapes (Kurz & Baudains, 2012).

In sum, it seems that people prefer landscapes with native plants and believe they have positive qualities and, thus, likely have positive attitudes about native plants. However, research specifically on attitudes about native plants is meager and does not clearly define attributes of native plants that would explain attitudes. This highlights the need for a more systematically developed scale on attitudes toward native plants. The present work attempts to fill this need with a newly developed and theory-driven measure of attitudes about native plants.

Landscaping goals and perception research provides useful information on characteristics of native plants relevant for understanding components of attitudes about native plants and provide a conceptual foundation of a new attitudes measure. Dating back to formative research on expectancy-value theories of attitudes, goals have informed relevant attributes for determining individuals' attitudes (Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). Research, primarily conducted by Peak, Rosenberg, and Carlson at the University of Michigan (Carlson, 1956; Peak, 1955; Rosenberg, 1956 as cited in; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993), tested the idea that attitude structure is a function of the instrumentality of an attitude object in helping or interfering with goal attainment and the satisfaction gained from that attainment. From this perspective, specific attributes of a given object determine its instrumentality in achieving a particular goal. Moreover, the extent to which an object is expected to possess attributes that help achieve valued goals determines one's attitude toward that object. For example, if native plants are expected to be ecologically beneficial and having plants that are ecologically beneficial is a valued goal, then the expectation indicates a positive attitude toward native plants. Therefore, it is important that an attitude measure include attributes that can be linked to goals that people generally value.

The present research draws from literature on landscaping goals and motivations to identify attributes of plants that people are likely to value in order to then assess whether people expect native plants to possess these attributes. Assessing homeowners' attitudes toward native plants in terms of their landscaping goals could provide useful information about not just whether homeowners view native plants positively or negatively but why they view them positively or negatively — because they are or are not expected to fulfill important goals. Research on goals and motivations for landscaping decisions has consistently identified aesthetic appeal, or attractiveness, as a primary landscape motive (Blaine, Clayton, Robbins, & Grewal, 2012; Clayton, 2007; Goddard et al., 2013; Larson, Casagrande, Harlan, & Yabiku, 2009; Uren, Dzidic, & Bishop, 2015). In a content analysis of terms people use to describe attractive and unattractive yards, three categories emerged: neatness, stewardship, and naturalness (Nassauer, 1995). Within this study, neatness refers to the orderliness of a landscape, stewardship is synonymous with land maintenance/management and signals the extent to which a landscape looks “cared for”, and the concept of naturalness directly subsumes the presence of biodiversity and wildlife habitats in landscapes (Nassauer, 1995). The attractiveness of natural beauty is also suggested by the goal of observing nature (Blaine et al., 2012; Clayton, 2007; Goddard et al., 2013; Kiesling & Manning, 2010).

While general aesthetic appeal may be homeowners' primary goal for their landscape, people perceive landscape attractiveness along multiple dimensions connecting to other goals. A second frequently mentioned goal is achieving ecological value, which is related to the goal of naturalness noted above. These benefits include promoting biodiversity, maintaining healthy ecosystems, minimizing resource use (Clayton, 2007; Larson et al., 2009; Nassauer, 1995). Similar attributes have also been studied with regard to species management in general (Czech, Krausman, & Borkhataria, 1998) and identified in a recent exploratory study on public prioritization of species characteristics (da Silva, Madureira, Costa, & Santos, 2016). A third is achieving economic value from one's landscaping (Fischer et al., 2014; Nassauer, 1995; Selge, Fischer, & van der Wal, 2011) including enhancing property value (Behe et al., 2005; Clayton, 2007). A final notable goal is easy maintenance, which aligns with a goal of controllability (Clayton, 2007; Larson et al., 2009; Nassauer, 1995), Thus, clear commonalities are present between research on goals and motivations for residential landscaping decisions and attributes of plants and other species relevant for land and species management decisions. These recurrent concepts — specifically, aesthetic appeal, ecological value, economic value, and maintenance requirement— form the basis of a multi-dimensional model of attitudes that we use in the present research. We assess whether people believe that native plants contribute to or take away from attractive landscapes, people are aware of their contribution to ecological value of one's yard, they believe that they improve or take away from the economic value of their landscaping, and they are easy or difficult to maintain. This measure allows us to test not only whether and under what contexts attitudes predict landscaping practices but it also allows us to test whether specific components of these attitudes are more predictive of planting native plants and sensitive to situational pressures.

The typical residential suburban landscape is more than an ecological place where turfgrass grows — it is a social place with social consequences. Aside from functioning as space for recreation and social gathering (Blaine et al., 2012; Clayton, 2007; Kiesling & Manning, 2010), residential landscapes are “social symbols” that convey information about people's identity, character, values, and status within a community (Blaine et al., 2012; Larsen & Harlan, 2006; Neel, Sadalla, Berlin, Ledlow, & Neufeld, 2014). Further, social pressures like descriptive norms influence both preferences for landscape design (Larsen & Harlan, 2006; Nassauer, Wang, & Dayrell, 2009) and landscaping decisions such as fertilizer usage (Carrico, Fraser, & Bazuin, 2013). The present work examines not only the influence of social norms on adding native plants to the home landscape but also the conditions under which social norms are more or less important.

The extent to which social pressures influence native plant preferences and landscaping behavior may differ depending on whether the context is specified as the front yard or the back yard (Carrico et al., 2013; Larsen & Harlan, 2006). For example, social norms predict landscaping preferences and landscaping behavior in the front yard but not the backyard (Carrico et al., 2013; Larsen & Harlan, 2006). While the public versus private nature of the front and backyard, respectively, may relate to these differences, a psychological explanation for different effects of social norms between front and backyards is situational strength — the extent to which implicit or explicit cues from environmental conditions pressure individuals to engage in or refrain from a specific behavior (Meyer et al., 2010; Meyer et al., 2014). The stronger the situation, the more that environmental cues, such as social norms, pressure people to behave in a particular way and the less behavioral variance between people. (Meyer et al., 2009, 2010, 2014). Consistent with the argument that differences in situational strength can explain differences in the power of social norms in front yards versus back yards, researchers have reasoned that the different effects of social pressures on landscape decisions between the front yard and backyard could be a matter of public versus private spaces; the visibility of front yards intensifies the influence of social pressures (Carrico et al., 2013; Larsen & Harlan, 2006). Because public places contain more environmental cues for socially expected behavior, it follows that front yards, which are typically visible to the public, would be stronger situations than backyards, which are typically private.

Situational strength plays a different moderating role within attitude-behavior relations than it does within norms-behavior relations. Research has illustrated that perception of situational strength moderates trait-outcome relationships such that strong situations weaken the relationship between individual differences and behavior outcomes (Meyer et al., 2009, 2010, 2014). Therefore, if front yards are typically perceived as strong situations, the influence of individual differences such as attitudes on front yard behavior should be weaker than for backyard behavior. This means we would see people's attitudes directing their behavior more so in the backyard than in the front.

While we predict that front yards, due to their more public nature, will have stronger situations than backyards, there are likely variations in perceptions of situational strength. Some individuals, for example, may be more or less sensitive to perceiving situational strength. Characteristics of yards may affect perceived situational strength as well. For example, people who live on corner lots may believe that their backyards are as public as their front yards. As another example, people who hold more social events in their backyard may believe their yards are under more public scrutiny than those who hold fewer social events. Thus, perceived situational strength may moderate the effects of attitudes and norms independent of whether people are thinking about the front yard or back yard.

Situational strength can be understood through four mechanisms that restrict behavioral expression of dispositions: clarity, consistency, constraints, and consequences (Meyer et al., 2014). Meyer et al. (2014) constructed a measure of situational strength as applied to one's work place. We take these same dimensions and apply them to the residential landscape. Thus, strong situations with regard in one's yard can be conceived of as those where socially appropriate behavioral norms are clear, consistently experienced across individuals, experienced as constraints on yard care behaviors, and there are expected consequences for deviating from these norms.

Participants in the present research reported their attitudes about native plants, perceptions about their neighbors’ native plant behaviors (perceived social norms), their own native plant behaviors and intentions, and the perceived situational strength of their yards. Social norms, behaviors, intentions, and situational strength were assessed separately for front yards and backyards and correlated errors were modeled in order to correct for the independence of errors assumption. We assessed both general attitudes about native plants as well as four goal-based dimensions of (aesthetics, ecological value, maintenance required, and social-economic value), and both general and goal-based attitudes were treated as between-participant variables in our analyses. After developing the attitudes measure and adapting the situational strength measure to fit the residential landscape context, we tested the following hypotheses.

Hypothesis 1a

Backyards will be perceived to have weaker situational strength than front yards.

Hypothesis 1b

Front yards will be perceived to have social norms less conducive to planting native plants than back yards.

Hypothesis 2a

Favorable attitudes about native plants will be positively associated with native plant behavioral intentions and behaviors.

Hypothesis 2b

A positive relation between attitudes and intentions/behaviors will be stronger in the backyard than in the front yard

Hypothesis 2c

A positive relation between attitudes and intentions/behaviors will be stronger when participants perceive weaker situational strength and will not differ by location.

Exploratory analyses will test whether the above predictions differ by the subcomponents of native plant attitudes: aesthetic appeal, maintenance requirement, economic value, and ecological value.

Hypothesis 3a

Favorable social norms for planting native plants will be positively associated with native plant behavioral intentions and behaviors.

Hypothesis 3b

A positive relation between norms and intent/behavior will be stronger in the front yard than in the backyard.

Hypothesis 3c

A positive relation between norms and intent/behavior will be stronger when participants perceive stronger situational strength and will not differ by location.

Section snippets

Participants

Three hundred and ninety-two homeowners were recruited and paid $1.00 to participate in a Qualtrics survey through Amazon TurkPrime. While not fully representative of the U.S population (e.g. MTurk participants have higher education), MTurk participants provide rapid, high-quality, and inexpensive data (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011; Paolacci, Chandler, & Ipeirotis, 2010). Additionally, because the proposed research relates to yards and landscaping behavior, only participants who

Attitudes

Participants had positive attitudes about native plants (see Table 1), with average attitudes significantly higher than the midpoint of the scale for all attitudes. Repeated measures analysis of the four attitude subtypes, F(1,391) = 161.30, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.29, revealed that the ecological value was the most positive goal-based attitude, followed by aesthetic value, socio-economic value and ease of maintenance (ps < .001). Contrasts among the four attitude subtypes showed that ecological

Discussion

Results from the present research illustrate the value of understanding different dimensions of goal-based attitudes and the contexts in which these attitudes predict environmental behaviors. Also, with the majority of research on person-by-situation interactions focused on personality traits, the present research extends the literature to a likely more malleable individual difference — attitudes. Additionally, the results have implications for interventions and community programs aimed to

Conclusions

The present work demonstrated the value in assessing attitudes with theory-derived granularity as opposed to only broad generalization. The work also illustrates the importance of considering situational contexts. First, people generally have positive attitudes about native plants as revealed by general attitudes and goal-based attitudes, with ecological value as the most positive component of native plant attitudes. Second, social norms are strong predictors of behavioral intentions and

Financial disclosure

The present research received financial support from Mt. Cuba Center, Hockessin, DE.

Author statement

Both authors contributed to the conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, and writing of this paper.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge and thank Nathan Geiger, Mel Mark, Rustin Meyer, and Sara Stevenson for their feedback on this project. We also wish to acknowledge Mt. Cuba Center for their support of this research.

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