Models of Justice in the Environmental Debate - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Susan Clayton

Factor analysis. To see if the 12 principles rated could be reduced to a smaller number of factors, each set of 12 ratings (those following the property scenario and those following the logging scenario) was subjected to a principal-components analysis. In each case, four factors with an eigenvalue greater than 1 were identified. Correlations between the factor scores for the two scenarios confirmed that three of the factors were substantially similar (with correlations of .55-.69, all significant at p [less than].001) across scenarios. The fourth factor varied between scenarios and was not examined further.

Among the three retained factors, one loaded primarily on the following items: "Allowing people to continue to use resources they have been using," "Making sure people get what they need," and "Making sure people get what they have worked for." I called this the distributive justice factor, since it specifies who should receive what resources.

A second factor loaded principally on two items: "The rights of the environment" and "Responsibility to other species," with a substantial loading also on "Responsibility to future generations." I called this the environmental justice factor.

The third factor loaded on "The equal treatment of all groups" and "The chance for everyone to have a say." I called this the procedural justice factor. Factor loadings are included in Table 1.

Main effects. Simply presenting the conflict from a proenvironmental or an antienvironmental perspective had no effect. Ecocentrism predicted weight given to the environmental justice factor (rs = .42 and .52 for the two scenarios; ps [less than] .001) Environmental apathy predicted less weight to the environmental justice factor (r = -.40, p [less than] .001, for both scenarios) and more weight to the distributive justice factor (rs = .24, p [less than] .05, and .30, p [less than] .01, respectively). Anthropocentrism predicted a slight increase in support for distributive justice (significant only for the logging scenario, rs = .22 and .16). There were no consistent effects of gender or level of group identification on the factor scores.

Interaction effects. To allow for an examination of the interaction between subject variables and the independent variable, the former were dichotomized according to a median split. The environmental principles showed an interaction between experimental condition and group identification: In the nonenvironmental condition, people high in group identification rated these principles as more important than did people low in group identification, but in the environmental condition low group-identified people rated them higher than did high group-identified people. Means are shown in Table 2. In general, experimental condition made more of a difference in the ratings of people low in group identification than in those of people high in group identification. It may be that environmentalism has become part of the collective ideology to such an extent that high group-identified people show less variability in their endorsement of these principles than do those low in group identification.