THE RELATIONSHIP OF ECOCENTRIC AND ANTHROPOCENTRIC MOTIVES TO ATTITUDES TOWARD LARGE CARNIVORES

Groups involved in the livestock vs large carnivore conflict hold widely divergent attitudes toward carnivores, yet they all endorse general ecocentric values. The hypothesis that contrasting motives for the endorsement of ecocentric values may mediate between the general values and attitudes toward carnivores was evaluated in a survey among sheep farmers, wildlife managers, and research biologists in Norway. Results showed positive associations between anthropocentrism and negative attitudes toward carnivores, and between ecocentrism and positive attitudes toward carnivores for all three groups. Farmers, relative to the other groups, scored lowest on the ecocentric and highest on the anthropocentric subscales, as operationalized by Thompson and Barton (1994). This result may be interpreted within a cognitive hierarchy model where environmental beliefs may transform general ecocentric values into negative or positive attitudes toward one specific environmental category.     

THE MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF FAMILIAR, LONG-DISTANCE JOURNEYS

The memory of a familiar, long-distance journey was compared to the memory of the previous day's events by rating the clearness or vividness of memories retrieved from four equal-sized segments on the distance or time dimension. Across five experiments, the results showed stable primacy and recency effects on the spatial distance task, and recency-only on the time-of-the-day task. The serial position effects of both tasks were robust and resistant to task manipulations. The results are interpreted in terms of different mental representation formats for everyday memories of familiar journeys and for chronological memories.