A review of public attitudes to climate change and transport: summary report

3. The attitude-behaviour gap

This review explored the question of why knowledge and attitudes about climate change or environmental issues often fail to be translated into changes in travel behaviour to mitigate its effects - this is the infamous attitude-behaviour gap. ⁶ Indeed, the attitude-behaviour gap could be described as one of the greatest challenges facing the public climate change agenda. This is true of all attempts to influence individual behaviour, not only travel. However, the drivers and barriers to travel behaviour change are extremely complex. In this regard, a source of the difficulty perhaps lies in the expectation that there should be a consistency between attitudes and behaviour in the first place.

With respect to influencing travel choices and closing this gap, the big question is: does it actually matter whether people have a detailed knowledge of the causes and consequences of climate change? It would appear there are two opposing views on the importance of information with respect to its role in closing the attitude-behaviour gap:

• Those that believe if only people are informed and knowledgeable, they will act in accordance with this new knowledge (termed the 'deficit model');
• Those that believe information is necessary but not sufficient to encourage individual action. Advocates of this belief recognise the need to understand behaviour change from a number of different perspectives (anthropological, socio-psychological and economic) and at a number of different levels in society and strive for a more civic or deliberative ideal of public engagement.

The evidence review suggests the latter view represents the emerging consensus. Hence, an understanding of the different roles played by knowledge, attitudes and behaviour is required before it is possible to have an appreciation of the factors that inhibit, drive and facilitate behavioural change.

In order to fully understand the role of these factors, it is instructive to place them in established socio-psychological models. Unfortunately, there is no 'grand unified theory' of behaviour change. Instead, numerous theoretical frameworks have been developed to explain different aspects of the attitude-behaviour gap. Chapter 3 of the main report reviews a number of theories at four different levels (see Table 3.1) in order to assess the evidence on the factors that are important barriers or drivers to behaviour change. These barriers and drivers are then reviewed in turn in Chapter 4. The theories reviewed were as follows:

Table 3.1 Theories reviewed in this chapter

The evidence shows clearly that no one theory is sufficient, on its own, to explain the links between attitude and behaviour. This review suggests that all the attitude-behaviour models (and their constructs) discussed are complementary, each offering a unique insight into the attitude-action gap with respect to travel choice - insights that can readily be used to inform travel policy. This review has also demonstrated that the application of these theories to travel behaviour has so far been ad hoc and the state of the art is currently immature. To the extent that theory has been applied to travel behaviour, attention has been paid almost exclusively to the individual level. Yet research centred on the individual usually ignores the interactive relationship of behaviour in its social, cultural and economic dimension, thereby missing the possibility to fully understand crucial determinants of behaviour.

Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) is by far the most common and influential theory used to explore the attitude-behaviour gap for innumerable behaviours in the social, environmental, and health psychology fields, including travel. Although the strength of this theory is its simplicity and wide applicability, other individual and interpersonal level theories additionally measure the psychological processes giving rise to altruistic/ pro-environmental behaviours, variously including notions of moral norms, social norms and values. However, the review notes that some influences on travel modal choice are not sufficiently accounted for by any of the accepted models. These include: affective evaluations (e.g. freedom and status), social-symbolic motives (self-identity) and habitual behaviours, reviewed in Chapter 4.

In addition, all of the theories have difficulty examining climate change. This is because climate change is a somewhat intangible, ambiguous and a contested phenomena. For instance, is climate change conceptualised as 'pollution'? Is it sea level rise? Is it warmer temperatures? Is it local or global? It is difficult to measure attitudes and behavioural response when the attitude 'object' is open to interpretation in this way. This may be one reason why climate change has been examined so infrequently using behaviour change theory or otherwise and why it is more common to find studies on general or specific environmental damage which is more readily understood by the public. In either case, the fact that attitudes and constructs have been measured and potentially interpreted by respondents in a variety of different ways, means that it is very difficult to compare across results. Most of these theories, therefore, are too simplistic on their own for a study of travel behaviour and climate change.

A good start for any research in this area, therefore, would be some in-depth understanding of how climate change is conceptualised by members of the public and to gauge emotional response in relation to these interpretations (research recommendation R1) and how the public understanding forms from various information sources such as the media (R3). In addition, there is wide scope for new insights into individual and societal processes of change with respect to travel mode choice, journey frequency, car purchasing and the interaction between other lifestyle choices and travel. In particular, the review identifies the need to establish the relative importance of the barriers and precursors to changing travel behaviour (R4) - and recommends that this is achieved by extending existing theoretical frameworks; considering social, affective, habitual, imitative and learned determinants of behaviour in future research; and employing deliberative methods of investigation at the individual and collective level.

⁶ Also known as the ‘attitude-action’ or ‘value-action’ gap.

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