The psychological drivers of pro-environmental behaviors on recreational trails in Canmore, Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For effective human-wildlife coexistence, particularly in landscapes where human activity overlaps with large predator habitats, gaining insight into the determinants of recreational trail users’ pro-environmental behaviour (PEB) is essential. Human cognitions, like norms and attitudes, are often positively associated with PEBs (Cialdini et al., 2006; Pearce et al., 2022; van Riper & Gerard, 2014). The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of three human cognitions on wildlife- and trail-specific PEBs. Three key psychological drivers were selected as independent variables based on a literature review: 1) personal norms; 2) social norms; and 3) place attachment. Additionally, the study examines the differences in wildlife- and trail-specific PEB levels between locals and visitors. Much of the existing research examines the predictive power of human cognitions on general PEBs – such as recycling, energy consumption, and littering. This study developed measures of wildlife- and trail-supportive PEBs in collaboration with park agency staff and from a literature review. With a focus on local predators (bears, wolves, cougars, etc.), a survey was distributed to users of recreational trails near Canmore, Alberta, Canada during the summer of 2023. The three aforementioned psychological variables and selected demographics were examined for their influence on wildlife- and trail-specific PEBs. Results found only personal norms to be significantly and positively associated with both wildlife- and trail-specific PEBs. Despite predictions, place attachment and social norms were not significantly associated with the PEBs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".