Emotion, Fact, and Anthropogenic Disturbances: Undergraduate Attitudes toward Wildfire and Urbanization after a Brief Intervention

Understanding attitudes towards anthropogenic disturbances, especially among undergraduates, is important to inform educational practices because of the theoretical link between attitude and behavior. We evaluated the attitudes of undergraduate students in a biology majors course and nonmajors course toward two anthropogenic disturbances: wildfire and urbanization. Student attitudes were assessed via an online Wildfire and Urbanization Attitude survey (WUAS) before and after a video intervention, randomly delivered as either fact- or emotion-based versions. Student beliefs regarding wildfire and urbanization were positively correlated with their general intention to act toward environmental issues on both pre- and postintervention surveys, as suggested by theory. Student belief that urbanization was bad for the environment increased from pre- to postintervention. However, beliefs and intention to act did not statistically differ between majors/nonmajors or intervention video type. This study hints that brief interventions can impact student disturbance beliefs, but more research is needed to guide curriculum development. Despite some research suggesting the value of emotion to inspire climate action, our results suggest that more work needs to be done regarding the value of emotion to increase environmental action toward other anthropogenic disturbances.