THE WASHINGTON TIMES.- Al Gore has been accused of hypocrisy for talking the talk on climate change despite burning through fossil fuels at a rapid clip, but it turns out he’s not alone.
A study by Cornell and the University of Michigan researchers found that those “highly concerned” about climate change were less likely to engage in recycling and other eco-friendly behaviors than global-warming skeptics.
Published in the April edition of the Journal of Environmental Psychology, the one-year study broke 600 participants into three groups based on their level of concern about climate change: “highly concerned,” “cautiously worried,” and “skeptical.”
The “highly concerned” cluster was “most supportive of government climate policies, but least likely to report individual-level actions, whereas the ‘Skeptical’ opposed policy solutions but were most likely to report engaging in individual-level pro-environmental behaviors,” the researchers concluded.
Conducting the study, entitled “Believing in climate change but not behaving sustainably,” were Cornell assistant professor Neil A. Lewis Jr. and University of Michigan researchers Michael P. Hall and Phoebe C. Ellsworth.
The skeptics were the more likely than the “highly concerned” to recycle, use public transportation and reusable shopping bags, and buy eco-friendly products.
Considerable evidence suggests that the steroid hormone testosterone mediates major life-history trade-offs in vertebrates, promoting mating effort at the expense of parenting effort or survival. Observations from a range of wild primates support the “Challenge Hypothesis,” which posits that variation in male testosterone is more closely associated with aggressive mating competition than with reproductive physiology. In both seasonally and non-seasonally breeding species, males increase testosterone production primarily when competing for fecund females. In species where males compete to maintain long-term access to females, testosterone increases when males are threatened with losing access to females, rather than during mating periods. And when male status is linked to mating success, and dependent on aggression, high-ranking males normally maintain higher testosterone levels than subordinates, particularly when dominance hierarchies are unstable. Trade-offs between parenting effort and mating effort appear to be weak in most primates, because direct investment in the form of infant transport and provisioning is rare. Instead, infant protection is the primary form of paternal investment in the order. Testosterone does not inhibit this form of investment, which relies on male aggression. Testosterone has a wide range of effects in primates that plausibly function to support male competitive behavior. These include psychological effects related to dominance striving, analgesic effects, and effects on the development and maintenance of the armaments and adornments that males employ in mating competition.
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