The Values of Student Environmentalists

Abstract Students active in environmental organizations were surveyed to study the relationship between levels of environmental involvement and personal values. Environmentally active respondents scored notably higher than a normative sample on the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey (AVL; 1960) subscale measures of social values and lower on the sub-scales for economic and political values. Intercorrelations of Maloney, Ward, and Braucht's (1975) Ecological Attitudes and Knowledge subscales indicated that actual commitment, verbal commitment, and affective involvement scores were not correlated with environmental knowledge. Social values were significant predictors of both affective involvement and actual commitment to environmental causes.