Study on the Dynamical Process of Environmental Awareness and Attitudes Formation in a Society

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A society, either local or global, can be regarded as being composed of a large number of members, who individually have different environmental values and assume different attitudes and behaviors towards environmental protection. The group consciousness will change due to internal and external interactions among members and it might convert into collective actions. It is such dynamical processes that are a key for both cause and solution of environmental problems. This study presents a general mathematical model to describe such dynamical aspects of the societal opinion and attitude formation in relation to the environment. A cell dynamical systems model is introduced to describe the characteristics of a society that are expressed by three parameters, i.e., self-assurance parameter, mutual interaction parameter, and the responsiveness parameter. Numerical simulations are conducted for different sets of parameters governing the trasition probabilities of societal opinion and attitudes. In the case where members have a strong tendency of self-assurance, the distribution of individual opinions will be in a widely disposed multi-modal situation. On the other hand, when such tendency is weak, it is sharply peaked at a pro-environmental point. The interaction parameter governs the correlation among individual opinions in the group. If individual members are responsive to external forces, then the distribution of individual opinions tends to be biased. The characteristic results of the simulation are used to interpret the data obtained from relevant questionnaire surveys on the people's environmental opinion and attitudes.