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

一个社会，无论是局部的还是全球性的，都可以被认为是由大量的成员组成的，这些成员各自具有不同的环境价值观，对环境保护采取不同的态度和行为。群体意识会因成员之间的内部和外部互动而发生变化，并可能转化为集体行动。正是这样的动力过程是环境问题产生和解决的关键。这项研究提出了一个通用的数学模型来描述与环境有关的社会观点和态度形成的这些动态方面。引入一个细胞动力学系统模型来描述一个社会的特征，该模型由三个参数表示，即自保参数、相互作用参数和响应性参数。对控制社会观点和态度转变概率的不同参数集进行了数值模拟。在成员自我肯定倾向较强的情况下，个人意见的分布将处于广泛分布的多模式情况下。另一方面，当这种倾向很弱时，它会在支持环境的时间点急剧达到顶峰。交互参数控制组中个人意见之间的相关性。如果个别成员对外力作出反应，则个别意见的分布往往是有偏见的。模拟的特征结果被用来解释从关于人们的环境观点和态度的相关问卷调查中获得的数据。

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.