미디어를 통한 환경정보 이용이 친환경 행동에 미치는 영향의 기제 : 정보처리 과정에서 정보 불충분성과 정보 수집능력의 역할

초록

Environmental pollution is a serious social risk issue. A variety of environmental information is provided through various media, but it sometimes does not receive enough attention from the public and often fails to lead people to engage in pro-environmental behavior. Therefore, understanding the conditions and processes through which media use of environmental information affects pro-environmental behavior is an important task for both communication researchers and practitioners. Guided by the heuristic-systematic information processing model and the risk information seeking model, this study examined how environmental information delivered through the media affects people’s pro-environmental behaviors, as well as the roles played in this process of information insufficiency and information gathering capacity. Secondary survey data (“2023 National Environmental Awareness Survey”) collected nationwide among 3,054 Korean adults were analyzed, and a path model was fitted. The path model tested direct, mediated, and moderated mediation effects among media use, information insufficiency, information gathering capacity, heuristic-systematic information processing, and pro-environmental behavior. The results are as follows; First, environment-specific media use had direct positive effects, while information insufficiency had negative effects, on pro-environmental behaviors. Second, information insufficiency had negative effects only on systematic processing. Third, systematic processing had positive effects, while heuristic processing had negative effects, on pro-environmental behaviors. Fourth, an individual's information gathering capacity had positive effects on both systematic and heuristic information processing. Fifth, media use had positive effects on pro-environmental behaviors mediated by information insufficiency and systematic and heuristic information processing, respectively, but the serial mediation effect was not significant. Finally, the moderating and moderated mediating effects of information gathering capacity were not statistically significant. This study provides practical implications for future environmental campaigns and policymaking through its examination of the roles of information insufficiency, information processing, and information gathering capacity in the process of environment-specific media effects on pro-environmental behaviors. In particular, our results emphasize that it is important for environment-related organizations and governments to provide environmental information through various media channels, but it is even more critical to understand how sufficiently people perceive environmental information, how capable they are of collecting, discriminating, and interpreting such information, and under what circumstances they are processed systematically. In addition, people's ability to efficiently collect and process accurate information from various sources on various risk issues may affect eco-friendly behavior by processing environmental information more efficiently and sometimes systematically. Therefore, environmental communication practitioners should develop various strategies to prormote pro-environmental behavior while enhancing the public‘s ability to pay attention to environmental issues and to identify and collect high-quality information in a complex media environment.

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