The Influence of Attitude Priming and Social Responsibility on the Valuation of Environmental Public Goods Using Paired Comparisons

Determining the value of an environmental public good, such as litigation over oil-spill damage to a beach, is an abstract and difficult task. Integration of economics and psychology enabled the study of how social responsibility and persuasive priming influenced the valuations of environmental public goods. Research participants were 460 university students randomly assigned to one of six combinations of social responsibility and either a negative, neutral, or positive priming editorial about the environment. Participants completed an interactive computer program in which the items were either environmental public goods (e.g., wildlife refuge, clean air) private goods of known market value (e.g., $15 meal, $500 airline ticket) or sums of money ranging from $1 to $9000. Results indicated the values derived for the environmental public goods were higher when participants had sole responsibility for the group outcome, but were not affected by priming editorials, although the editorials affected subsequent attitudes. 838 ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 31 No. 6, November 1999 838-857 © 1999 Sage Publications, Inc. The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is okay as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be measured or give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t very important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide. —Daniel Yankelovich (Smith, 1972) Advocates of environmental objectives often promote the preservation of natural resources because they have value above and beyond what could be derived through commercial exploitation. Yet there are times when decision makers need to attach some sort of market value to these resources. Economists refer to these nonmarket resources as public goods, in contrast to private goods that can be bought and sold in the marketplace. Several troubling yet important policy questions require monetary valuation of our environmental public goods. Methods used include natural resource damage assessment in cases of litigation, benefit/cost analysis of environmental management alternatives, economic impact assessment, and evaluation of the human causes and consequences of ecosystem changes. These and other important resource decisions may hinge on knowledge of the value people place on public environmental goods, yet because the market fails to include valid, complete, and credible information about aesthetic value, bequest value, existence value, and the like, what the market tells us about these types of evaluations may be biased and misleading. The result may be inefficiency in the allocation and use of these resources. Furthermore, some people and cultures hold environmental values that may not be amenable to monetary valuation by any method (e.g., isolated, indigenous tribes who use a barter system to obtain goods and services). Therefore, other ways to include such values in decision making and analysis must be used. Economists have developed a commonly used valuation method for measuring the value of goods that are not bought and sold in a market, such as visibility in a national park or viability of native populations of anadromous fish in a river. This method for estimating nonmarket values, especially the so-called “nonuse” or “passive use” value, is called the contingent value method (CVM). This method involves the use of sample surveys (questionClarke et al. / PAIRED COMPARISON TECHNIQUE 839 AUTHORS’ NOTE: Correspondence should be addressed to Andrea Clarke, USDANatural Resources Conservation Service, 3512 Swan Lane, Fort Collins, CO 80524. naires) to elicit and assess the willingness of respondents to pay for (generally) hypothetical projects or programs. An example might be asking taxpayers how much they would be willing to increase a sales or property tax to protect a wildlife habitat. However, CVM is not fully accepted in some policy circles or among some economists (Arrow et al., 1993; Cambridge Economics, 1992; Portney, 1994). For example, valuing of goods is usually couched in terms of neoclassical microeconomic theory, which assumes that economic choices follow the postulate of rationality. Economists interpret such “global rationality” to mean, among other things, that the value of a good is approximately the same whether one is buying or selling. Yet with CVM, it is almost always the case that the value of a good derived from willingness to accept (WTA) payment for its loss is higher than its value derived from willingness to pay (WTP) to acquire it (e.g., Boyce, Brown, McClelland, Peterson, & Schulze, 1992). Psychologists believe that loss aversion (our desire to avoid losses) explains this differential. Having a participant “choose” among alternative contingencies can help avoid the WTA/WTP discrepancy (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1990; see Kahneman, Ritov, Jacowitz, & Grant [1993] for a further critique of CVM from a psychological perspective). The integration of economics and psychology for the task of nonmarket valuation with focus on comparative judgment offers promise as an opportunity to develop a better understanding of economic decision making and may be useful in situations where more traditional valuation approaches are problematic. Economic decision making is, after all, a psychological phenomenon. Although economics provides a deductive theory based on observation of what Herbert Simon (1985) termed “bounded rationality” of human valuation behavior (i.e., the discrepancy between the perfect human rationality that is assumed in neoclassical economic theory and the reality of human behavior as observed in psychology), there exists a need to explore how people behave in a decision-making situation. This study explores some aspects of a psychometric scaling technique called paired comparison, which is used to evaluate decision-making strategies. For several generations, psychologists have been developing and applying methods for ordering preferences. The method of paired comparison (Bock & Jones, 1968; David, 1988; Edwards, 1957; Fechner, 1860; Guilford, 1954; Kendall & Gibbons, 1990; Thurstone, 1927; Torgerson, 1958) is a welldeveloped and established psychometric method for ordering elements of a given set of items. The method reduces every choice to a simple comparison of two items. Presumably, a choice between an environmental public good and a private good or sum of money would incorporate a participant’s notion of aesthetic, bequest, and other values difficult to assess in the market. The 840 ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR / November 1999