Values, Beliefs, and Proenvironmental Action: Attitude Formation Toward Emergent Attitude Objects1 zy PAUL C. zyxwvu STERN^ zyxwvuts National Research Council Washington, DC THOMAS DIETZ George Mason University LINDA KALOF GREGORY A. GUAGNANO State University of New York, Plattsburgh George Mason University Discoveries in environmental science become the raw material for constructing social attitude objects, individual attitudes, and broad public concerns. We explored a model in which individuals construct. attitudes to new or emergent attitude objects by ref- erencing personal values and beliefs about the consequences of the objects for their values. We found that a subset of the major clusters identified in value theory is associated with willingness to take proenvironmental action; that a biospheric value orientation cannot yet be discerned in a general population sample; that willingness to take proenvironmental action is a function of both values and beliefs, with values also predicting beliefs; and that gender differences can be attributed to both beliefs and values. Our model has promise for explicating the factors determining public concern with environmental conditions. The modern environmental movement has been a series of mobilizations of public responses to new or emergent attitude objects. Before Silent Spring (Carson, 1962), few had attitudes about the ecological effects of pesticides; before the events at Love Canal in 1979, few had attitudes about hazardous waste dumps; in 1994, environmental estrogens (Stone, 1994) and disruption of the global nitrogen cycle (Ayres, Schlesinger, & Socolow, 1994) appeared as possible social attitude objects in the making. Newly discovered or publicized environmental conditions often bring forth public reaction, but not always (despite government warnings, there has been little public outcry about 'This research was supported in part by U.S. National Science Foundation grants zy SES- 921 1591 and SES-9224036 and by the Northern Virginia Survey Research Laboratory of George Mason University. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the U.S. National Research Council. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1994 meeting of the American Sociological Association, Los Angeles, California. *Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Paul C. Stern, National Research Council, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, 2101 Con- stitution Avenue, Washington, DC 2041 8. 1611 zyxw Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1995, 25, 18, pp. 161 1-1 636 Copyright zyxwvutsr 0 1995 by V. H. Winston zyxwvu I!?, Son, Inc. All rights reserved.