Differentiated effects of risk perception and causal attribution on public behavioral responses to air pollution: A segmentation analysis.

Prior studies of public behavioral responses to air pollution mostly treat respondents as a homogenous group, an assumption that limits our ability to design tailored messages to mobilize actions. This paper employs segmentation techniques to examine the heterogeneity of individuals' adaptive and mitigation behaviors in response to air pollution. We administered a survey in Beijing and obtained a valid sample of 979 respondents. Using hierarchical cluster analysis, we identified three distinct segments of respondents: Activists (50.5%) who are most active in adaptation and mitigation; Mitigators (33.1%) who are fairly active in mitigation but inactive in adaptation; and Adaptors (16.4%) who are fairly active in adaptation but inactive in mitigation. They are distinguishable in terms of age, gender, education, smoking habits, and having respiratory diseases. Two important factors, i.e., risk perception and causal attribution, show different patterns in their influence on the different types of resonsive behaviors across the three segments. Risk perception is a positive predictor of adaptive behaviors and an insignificant predictor of mitigation behaviors; causal attribution has different influences on mitigation behaviors of the respondents in the different segments. Our study highlights the need to design tailored messages to motivate different segments of the population to adapt to and mitigate environmental risks. • Respondents can be clustered into three segments based on their responsive behaviors toward air pollution. • The different segments of the respondents have different demographic profiles. • Risk perception is a positive predictor of adaptive behaviors and an insignificant predictor of mitigation behaviors. • Internal causal attribution is a positive predictor of mitigation behaviors in certian segments.. • External causal attribution is a negative predictor of mitigation behaviors in certain segments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]