El impacto de las normas y las razones en el delito ecológico

Resumen

Environmental crimes are breaking of environment protection laws that involve behaviors that not everybody see as wrong (Mårald, 2001), although they can be punished by the criminal system or public administrations (Martín y Hernández, 2010). The study aims to analyze the relationship between the reasons for not developing a illegal anti-ecological behavior, pro-environmental motivation and social and personal norms. Participants were 311 university students, mainly women, enrolled in the three first years of Psychology, between 17 and 35 years old. They answered a questionnaire including 10 questions: two on illegal anti-ecological behavior, three on norms, four reasons to avoid illegal anti-ecological behaviors and one on group identity. A model on anti-ecological behavior was elaborated with these variables and tested by structural equation analysis. The results show that the illegal anti-ecological behavior is negatively related to internal reasons for avoid environmental crime and positively related to descriptive norms. Internal reasons constitute a latent variable that includes introjected reasons, identified reasons and integrated reasons. These internal reasons are influenced by pro-environmental motivation and moral judgment, which is influenced in turn by injunctive norms. The injunctive norms are determined by external reasons for avoiding environmental crime and by group identity. These results are discussed in terms of the relevance of the focus theory of normative conduct (Cialdini, Reno & Kallgren, 1990) and the self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) to understand environmental crime.