Beliefs about the environment: moving from the egocentric towards the ecocentric perspective Matija Svetina a *, Andreja Istenič-Starčič b , Matevž Juvančič b , Tomaž Novljan b , Maruška Šubic-Kovač b , Špela Verovšek b and Tadeja Zupančič b a Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Askerceva 2, Ljubljana 1000, Slovenia; b University of Ljubljana, Askerceva 2, Ljubljana 1000, Slovenia (Received 21 July 2014; final version received 5 September 2014) Our behaviour towards the environment depends on our beliefs about the environment. Beliefs, however, are a subject of change, particularly during important life transitions such as the transition to adolescence, because this is a period when an individual develops the ability of complex and abstract reasoning. Understanding this transition is therefore crucial for understanding and predicting the attitudes and courses of action in terms of sustainable development later in life. Due to many methodological constraints, the number of empirical studies examining these issues is very limited; the current study aimed to collect empirical data to explore the origins of our beliefs about the environment-related issues. We devised a picture association test and used it to compare children’ s and adolescents’ beliefs about our environment in the context of the means of transportation. A large sample of 2264 participants aged 6–18 years took part in the study. The data supported the claim that children’ s beliefs about environment share egocentric properties. The findings represent an important puzzle into the whole picture of children’ s thinking and offer us great insight into the origins of beliefs about environment-related questions in adults. Educational implications are addressed. Keywords: sustainable development; beliefs; three pillar model; children; adolescents Introduction Our beliefs about social and physical aspects of our envir- onment clearly relate to our behaviour and courses of actions (Gifford 2007; Kaga 2008; Shaffer & Kipp 2010; Ajzen 2012). To understand and stimulate behaviour in terms of sustainable development (SD), we need to under- stand the economic, social, political, physical, historical, psychological and other dimensions of our concepts and beliefs in regard to environment and sustainability, as well as the mechanisms of a belief-related change. The current article is an attempt to directly address these issues. In particular, we aimed to provide the empirical evidence to illustrate how one comes not only to understand the com- plexity of sustainability-related issues, but also to propose a method for studying the origins of beliefs about the environment. Below, we provide evidence to explain why it is so difficult to assess the beliefs about environ- ment, and explain the logic of the current study. The decade since 2000 witnessed an outbreak of the literature on SD (Dobson 2000; Schmuck & Schultz 2002; Harris 2003a; Schmuck & Vlek 2003; Hopwood et al. 2005; Hull 2008; Kazdin 2009) and suggested that the concept of SD is multi-dimensional and complex. Subsequently, there were many theoretical attempts to cope with this complexity, such as 3-pillar-, pyramid-, prism- and amoeba models (Joshi et al. 2007) to name only some of them. The 3-pillar model (Harris 2003b; D’Alisa 2007; Joshi et al. 2007) assumes three major dimensions which need to be taken into account to understand SD: environmental, economic and social. Pawłowski (2008) listed seven dimensions, including moral, ecological, social, economic, legal, technical and political. Somewhat different, but for our purpose a very relevant approach to understand SD is based on the work of A. Leopold (1949), who introduced ecocentric ethics focusing on the value system rather than on dimensions. Later debates (Hopwood et al. 2005;D’Alisa 2007) went a step further and introduced anthropo-, techno-, bio-centric approaches to denote the underlying value system and a cultural perspective for understanding SD. Whereas these approaches may be of great theoretical importance, they seemingly fail to help us solve our every- day problems, which are often concrete and require solu- tions in the right or wrong fashion (Pearson & Degotardi 2009). This might be the reason why the identification of unsustainable practices compared to the identification of sustainable practices is more straightforward (Björneloo & Nyberg 2007; Davis 2008) and why SD might be easier to understand at a global than at a concrete level. For exam- ple, motorised transportation beyond doubt contributed to better living conditions, but at the same time WHO (2004) report on road traffic injury prevention estimates that worldwide 1.2 million people are killed in road accidents each year. Road traffic thus seems to account for both, a sustainable and unsustainable change, and does not have a simple right or wrong answer in terms of SD. Why do we then seek for right or wrong answers if the problem itself is multidimensional? One way to address *Corresponding author: Email: m.svetina@ff.uni-lj.si International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology , 2014 Vol. 21, No. 6, 540–545, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13504509.2014.963735 © 2014 Taylor & Francis