Doctoral Dissertation Research: Cognitive processes underlying variation in human-environment interactions

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What factors are most formative in the development of environmental stewardship, and how do they vary across different cultural and environmental contexts? This doctoral dissertation project seeks to investigate variation in understandings of the natural environment and how these understandings shape conservation efforts. The project, which trains a graduate student in methods of empirical, ethnographic data collection and analysis, uses cutting-edge anthropological methods and theory to shed light on underlying cognitive processes driving shared understandings of environmental resources. The findings of this research will be disseminated broadly to academic and non-academic audiences, including NGOs and stakeholders in environmental stewardship. Specifically, this research asks whether different modes of engagement with marine environments reflect different moral attitudes about human activity and the natural world, and whether such moral attitudes inform conservation-relevant decision making. The work is situated in a marine recreation context that, like many others, is also highly climate-vulnerable, posing a common dilemma of balancing exploitation against conservation to preserve recreational activities. The investigators use cultural consensus analysis and ethnographic methods to explore variation in what is considered morally acceptable, as well as how this morality informs the way individuals navigate ethical dilemmas. The research will contribute to a broader, nuanced understanding of environmental morality as a driver influencing behavior in socio-environmental systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.