Do you feel a sense of guilt when you can only use a disposable spoon at the store because there are no other options? Ecological guilt (Eco-guilt) may represent how you are feeling then. Eco-guilt represents the emotion when you feel you could have done something to help the environment or reduce the environmental threat, yet unable to. It is a feeling felt when people perceive they have failed to meet their own standard or social standard for pro-environmental behaviour.

To reduce the eco-guilt felt, an individual may seek to avoid or reduce the level of guilt felt by engaging in pro-environmental behaviour. One may try to bring their behaviour in line with their desired standard of behaviour. How responsible one feels towards the negative environmental outcome caused will affect how likely an individual experience eco-guilt.

The eco-guilt felt is associated with perceived difficulty of rectifying one’s action to prevent or reduce environmental damage. The relation between eco-guilt and engaging in pro-environmental behaviour follows a curvilinear relationship.

When protecting the environment is of little cost, eco-guilt will remain low when the person takes no pro-environmental as action or engage in action that harms the environment. (i.e. an individual may perceive switching off water taps while one is brushing as a simple way to save water, therefore the individual may feel little eco-guilt for one’s failure to occasionally to turn off the lights).

Eco-guilt should increase with the amount of difficulty to perform the pro-environmental action. Eco-guilt increases to a point where the perceived effort to carry out the action is deemed too difficult or impossible. (i.e. an individual living in London may perceive opting for train-travel instead of air-travel to see a relative in Singapore as nearly impossible or laborious, as a result, the feelings of eco-guilt will decrease).

When a person feels they should be engaging in pro-environmental behaviour and did so, the level of eco-guilt felt should be the lowest. Conversely, when a person feels they should be engaging in pro-environmental behaviour but failed to do so, eco-guilt is felt at its highest level.

Guilt occurs when an individual has thought that makes one feel bad.  The person may avoid feeling bad by trying to change their thoughts or downplay their thoughts to avoid feeling bad. The theoretical concept to explain this human behaviour is cognitive dissonance – it is the discomfort that people felt when they behave in ways that are not consistent with their conception of themselves. It occurs when a person’s behaviour conflict with their attitude or when their beliefs and attitudes are in conflict. It provides a theoretical understanding of guilt-induced behaviour and the fundamental concept of dissonance theory is the need to maintain cognitive consistency – where actions are always consistent with one’s behaviour. The need for consistency in our cognition can be closely compared to people’s need for certainty – which is the idea of “illusions of control”. This is a form of heuristics, which are forms of mental shortcut to limit our information processing ability. In order to feel consistent, people may deny the environmental risk and threats one’s actions posed. We tend to create illusions of control, over this maybe at the expense of aggravating our tendencies to feel overconfident.

 

 

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