Use of theories of human action in recent conservation research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social sciences are increasingly recognized as useful for reorienting human action toward environmental conservation. Fully realizing the social sciences' potential requires applying social science methods to conservation challenges and drawing from and building on human action theories from across the social sciences to better understand how and when actions can realize positive social and environmental priorities. We conducted an in-depth analysis of a bounded, systematically selected set of conservation science peer-reviewed articles to investigate the prevalence of social science theories of human action in conservation research and whether these theories represent the richness of the social science literature related to human action. We censused papers published in 2023 in Conservation Biology, Conservation Letters, and Biological Conservation and assessed each paper's geographic scope, social science engagement, whether it investigated human action, and weather it explicitly used human action theories and underlying metatheory (i.e., ways of understanding the world and how one gains knowledge of it). Results across 533 papers showed that 32% of papers incorporated social science and that 64% of these social science papers investigated human action. Twenty-seven percent of these human action papers used explicit human action theories. The theory of planned behavior was the most used explicit theory (17% of action theory papers). The independent self metatheory was the most prevalent; it underlies the theory of planned behavior and focuses on understanding how personal attributes, such as values, shape intentional individual behavior. The prevalence of a few theories and metatheories in these dominant conservation journals may indicate a limited capacity for conservation research to build on previous research, avoid redundant reinvention, and unmask novel applications of social science theory that could reorient human action toward conservation. Human action theory use in conservation might be broadened by changing attitudes on the importance of human action theories for research; incorporating social theory in conservation education; asking reviewers to comment on theory usage and mandating theory reporting; creating spaces for social scientists and theory scholars; providing social scientists and theorists with decision-making power in organizations; rewarding theory use; recognizing feedback loops among theory use; and replacing colonial and capitalistic approaches to conservation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.119 | 0.242 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.069 | 0.070 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".