Revista Argentina de Clínica Psicológica 2020, Vol. XXIX, N°1, 1252-1257
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.180 1252
ANALYSIS ON P
OPULARIZATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY BASED
ON AUDIENCE PSYCHOLOGY
Xiaodong Dou, Xiurong Huang*
Abstract
The rapid economic growth in China is accompanied by many environmental problems. This calls for the popularization of environmental policy. Based on the principle of audience psychology, this paper aims to design rational countermeasures to popularize environmental policy. First, the main forms and contents of the popularization of environmental policy were summarized based on the relevant literature. Next, an online survey was conducted by random sampling on audience psychology facing the popularization of environmental policy, and the collected data were statistically analysed on SPSS 20.0. The results show that the audience psychology has a logical, positive correlation with the popularization of environmental policy; Based on audience psychology, the environmental policy should be popularized in five steps: attention, understanding, concession, retention, and action; the popularization of environmental policy must consider the different psychological features of the audiences with different educational degrees and occupation. The research results provide a novel method for the publicity of environmental policy.
Key words: Environmental Policy, Audience Psychology, Questionnaire Survey, Countermeasures.
Received: 18-04-19 | Accepted: 20-08-19
INTRODUCTION
Today, under the impetus of the conviction "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets" by General Secretary Xi Jinping, the domestic environment has undergone significant changes. In the past 40 years of reform and development, the environment has been affected to varying degree. The popularization of policies based on the environmental problems have become the research focus of many scholars and enterprises (Almer & Winkler, 2017). Also, the government has made significant achievements in environmental governance (Jansen & Brogan, 2015) through intensive researches on the environmental problems (Furnham & Hughes, 2014), but it is relatively weak in the promotion of
School of Law, Ningbo University, Ningbo 315211, China. E-Mail: [email protected]
environmental policy and the participation of all members in the publicity, awareness and practice of environmental policies. Especially with the development of the economy, the continuous advancement of society and the improvement of the subjective consciousness, China's environmental protection policies and regulations are also constantly improving (Lafferty & Houvden, 2003), so it is imperative to improve their environmental knowledge and awareness for promoting the environmental quality and enhancing the environmental awareness of the whole people to study how (Rasmussen & Ewoldsen, 2013). Many scholars and government departments at home and abroad are trying to use environmental policies that are more practical and easier to popularize (Li, Song, & Beresford et al., 2011). Meanwhile, as scholars have studied national environmental policies more intensively and extensively, there will be more audience involved in the environmental policies (Gren, 2010). Therefore,
XIAODONG DOU,XIURONG HUANG
1253
emphasis should be put on studying the effective popularization and mastery of environmental policies currently. It has been increasingly important to study how to conduct the effective and comprehensive publicity for different audiences.
This study applies the principle of audience psychology (Griffith, 1921), from the perspective of acceptance psychology (Friedman, 1953). In the preaching of environmental policy, all psychological factors should be mobilized to the interpretation, selection, understanding, and storage of policy information. The audience psychology advocates different psychological goals for different fields, and differentiates them according to different research goals (Parry & Goulder, 2008). According to the audience psychology, the goal of policy presentation should focus on the process of studying certain
information or people's psychological
interaction. It stresses the problems from the perspective of the audience, and make a systematic description under the condition of respecting the information content and the propaganda manner of the disseminated object, so as to achieve the desired or undesired effect of the disseminator through the study of the audience psychological changes.
PSYCHOLOGICAL CHANGES OF AUDIENCE IN THE POPULARIZATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL
POLICIES DURING THE REFORM AND
DEVELOPMENT
Interaction between the popularization of environmental policy and audience psychology
The reform and opening policy have brought about tremendous changes in China over the
past 40 years. It has not only encouraged the people to take the initiative in conceptual innovation, but also fully promote the wisdom of the Chinese people in solving problems, especially in the promotion and popularization of new things. In today's advocacy of
environmental policy learning and
comprehensive coverage, the popularization of environmental policy presents systematic logic
characteristic (Carraro, 2010). With the
interaction and mutual influence of its logical characteristics and the audience psychology, a
chart of the interaction between the
popularization of environmental policy and audience psychology was formed, as shown in Figure 1. The role of the audience psychology is mainly reflected in the three aspects: seeking knowledge, seeking intelligence and seeking truth. These three are interacted, and then fed back to the environmental policy information centre; finally, the policy information is screened
and cultured through the collection,
arrangement, and guidance of policy
consultation, which is a popularization process by the audience.
In the popularization process of
environmental policy, the audience presents certain levels of audience psychology, which can
be macroscopically quantified as micro
psychology, medium psychology, and macro
psychology according to the standard.
Meanwhile, under the influence of the audience psychology, the psychological characteristics of the audience can be divided into five steps in the
policy popularization, namely, attention,
understanding, concession, reservation and action. The specific logical relationship is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 1
.
Map of Interaction between Popularization of Environmental Policy and Audience
Psychology
Environmental Policy Information
Psychology of Seeking
Knowledge Psychology of Seeking Intelligence Rational Psychology
drive guidance
Systematization
Emotional participation
provid e
search
A
rr
an
ge
m
en
t
cu
ltu
re confirm
ANALYSIS ON POPULARIZATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY BASED ON AUDIENCE PSYCHOLOGY 1254
Figure 2
.
Environmental Policy Popularization Based on Audience Psychological Characteristics
The Psychological Function Level of the Audience
Classification of Psychological Orientation Targets of
Audiences
Micropsychology
Medium Psychology
Macro Psychology
Curiosity Psychology
Psychology of Seeing Private Persons
Aggressive Psychology
Interest, Motivation, Preference
Seeking Truth, Knowledge and Beauty
Morality, Culture and Cognition Features
Features
Features
Table 1.
Audience Psychological Change Matrix Model
Audience Psychology
Diversification of Moral Orientation Crisis awareness
The Weakening of Moral Control Mechanism National Consciousness Rising
The Disturbance of the Audience's Moral Value Orientation
Enhanced awareness of environmental protection
The Change of the Audience's Moral Objectives -
Changes in audience psychology during the process of environmental policy popularization Today, in the context of global marketization and Informa ionization, the audience psychology under various cultural exchanges and collisions is constantly changing. The change of audience psychology shows the matrix pattern, which is mainly concentrated in the diversification of moral orientation and the rise of crisis (hardship) awareness. Table 1 lists the matrix pattern of the audience's psychological change.
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY POPULARIZATION AND AUDIENCE PSYCHOLOGY
Main forms and contents of environmental policy popularization
On the one hand, environmental policy popularization should try to avoid the impact of negative orientation results; on the other hand, it should carefully consider its guiding effect on the audience, and enhance the positive effect of environmental policy popularization. Therefore, the popularization form of environmental policy should be selected under the condition of respecting the audience psychology and their acceptance law. Based on this, the main contents of environmental policy popularization from 2002 to 2018 were selected in this paper for
statistical analysis through survey analysis method. The popularized content was divided into four aspects: the environmental policy orientation (the role of policies in promoting the development of the industry), social results, the network media, and the government guidance. Figure 3 shows the results for the relative impact rates of the four aspects in different years.
Figure 3
.
Characteristics of Popularization of
Environmental Policy in Different Years
The results of Figure 3 show that the popularization of environmental policy has
2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020 40
50 60 70 80 90 100
Re
la
ti
ve
Im
pa
c
t
Ra
te
of
D
iffe
re
nt
P
opul
a
ri
z
a
ti
on
F
orm
s
Different years Policy orientation
Social results Network Media Government guidance
XIAODONG DOU,XIURONG HUANG
1255
begun to take shape since 2002. At that time, it was dominated by the government guidance and network media, with the relative impact rate reaching 61.5%, but the social effect wasn’t significant, so the popularization form of the audience had not formed yet. With the development of the society and the gradual
deepening of the environmental policy
presentation, the relative impact rate increased especially from 41.5% to 82.5% in terms of government guidance, which was almost doubled, mainly because of the government guidance for popularization of environmental policies and the higher utilization of network media, but environmental policy guidance had no significant effect. This reflects that China's environmental policies and regulations have not changed much in the past 16 years of
development and reform, and relevant
regulations and policies have been relatively well developed. The development of government propaganda and network media has increased the participation of the audience, in line with the relationship between the audience psychology and environment policy popularization analysed in Figure 1. Therefore, the popularity effect of environmental policy has a relationship of mutual influence and promotion with the audience psychology, which is a key factor of enhancing the popularity effect.
Audience psychology analysis and
countermeasures
Under the current popularization level of environmental policies, in order to provide a basis for the popularization of environmental
policies and master the process of
popularization, it is necessary to carefully conduct the systematic analysis for the psychology of audiences from the aspects of particularity and times-based characteristic of the audience. In this paper, the respondents were classified into two categories in terms of
different academic qualifications and
occupations respectively. The statistical analysis method, random sampling survey method, and questionnaire survey were used. The online questionnaire was designed in the four dimensions of audience’s receiving degree for the environmental policy, the actual practice results, the hope for social attention and certification, the social communication and understanding. A total of 2,785 questionnaires were distributed, and 2,552 were recovered,
ensuring the true and effective results. Finally, the survey results were analysed using Spss20.0 software, to obtain the relevant influencing factors and results. Figure 4 shows the survey results in different occupational backgrounds, while Figure 5 shows the degree of acceptance and recognition of the policy popularity by the audiences of different educational levels.
Figure 4
.
Psychological analysis of audiences
of different occupational types
Figure 5
.
Psychological analysis of audiences
with different educational backgrounds
From the results in Figure 4, it can be seen that the groups of different occupations show
the psychological characteristics of the
audience; the government officials played a more significant role in the process of audience policy popularization, followed by the students and teachers’ group, because of their strong ability to accept new knowledge and policies. Besides, it can be seen from Figure 5 that the
Receiving Degree Degree of practice Hope for Value Identity Audience UnderstandingAudience Communication 20
40 60 80 100
rel
at
e
ef
fec
t
Audience Psychological Types (Different Occupations)
social worker Manufacturing staff retired personnel Students and Teachers Government official
Receiving Degree Degree of practice Hope for Value Identity Audience Understanding 0
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Re
la
ti
ve
e
ffe
ct
Psychological Types of Audience
Master's degree or above Undergraduate Specialty Below specialty
ANALYSIS ON POPULARIZATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY BASED ON AUDIENCE PSYCHOLOGY 1256
groups with different educational backgrounds
show quite different psychological
characteristics; in terms of receiving level and practice, the audience with higher academic degree achieved better results, while those with relatively lower academic degree had relatively worse understanding of environmental policies and also consciously practicing effect, but in terms of the hope for value identity and social understanding, the audience with different academic backgrounds showed little difference. Thus, in the design of environmental policy popularization content based on audience psychology, we must try to present the boring and lengthy policies in a generalized form to meet the requirements of easy-to-understand, easy-to-learn and easy-to-operate by the audience. At the same time, attention should also be paid to the sense of identity, participation, and mutual understanding of audience's psychology.
In this section, based on the education background of the audience, the mastery degree after popularization, and the self-awareness degree of the audience's perception of the
environment, the characteristics of the
audience’s psychology and behavioural habits
were summarized. Combined with the
popularization effect, it’s found that the popularization of China's environmental policy is a contradiction with traditional and open
characteristics. On the one hand, the
environment policy is popularized under the improved content and norms, and on the other hand, rapid economic development has caused various fluctuations in the psychology of the
audience. With the increasing policy
propaganda, the audience's psychology has the
characteristics of closeness and high
developability. Therefore, based on the principle of audience psychology, it’s necessary to optimize the popularization content of the audience's environmental policy.
Planning and optimization of environmental policy popularization
Through the analysis for the popularization form of the above environmental policies and audience psychology, it’s found that the environmental policy plays an increasingly important role in the process of environmental governance, and the object of popularization become more sensible to the psychology of audience. In order to maximize the audience
psychology-based environmental policy
popularization effect in the environmental governance, the survey analysis and analogy method were used to re-plan the popularization of environmental policy, and also perform the qualitative analysis of the planning response principle, goal and orientation, and optimization
implementation results. Finally, the
countermeasures for the popularization of environmental policies under the psychological effect of the audience were proposed, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6 depicts the countermeasures of environmental policy popularization from the perspective of audience psychology in 11 dimensions at 3 levels. In terms of the popularization principle, fair and objective
propaganda is the primary content of
environmental policy propaganda, followed by
Figure 6
.
Environmental Policy Popularization Model Based on Audience Psychology
Popularization Principle
Popularization goals and targets
Optimizing the Principle of Popularization
Objective and im partial propaganda
Dialectical Treatm ent of Popularizing People's Morality and
Interests
People-oriented popularization
Increasing popularity and effectiveness Promoting the Popularization ,
Application and Practice of Environmental Protection Policies
Intellectual Competition and Interactive Publicity Case Teaching + Experience
Sharing
Satisfying the Receiver's Humanistic Psychology Focusing on People and Promoting Communication Broad participation in classified
publicity Policy-oriented classification
XIAODONG DOU,XIURONG HUANG
1257
the dialectical treatment of the logical relationship between the disseminator and disseminated objects, and people-oriented
popularization is the final step. The
popularization goal is to first increase the efficiency of publicity, then enhance the value model of policy propaganda, for expressing the theme of humanistic and rational thinking, and finally to promote through various competitions or lectures. For the countermeasures of popularization optimization, the first is to satisfy the receivers’ humanistic psychology, followed by the people-oriented communication, and finally the forms such as classified publicity and extensive popularization are used.
CONCLUSIONS
Based on the principle of audience psychology and the popularization model of environmental policy, this paper studies the best popularization method of environmental policy using the questionnaire survey and induction
method. Then, it analyses the change
characteristics of the audience psychology, the popularization method of the environmental policy, and the psychology of the audience, and proposes the countermeasures. The specific conclusions are as follows:
(1) Environmental policy orientation (the role of policies in promoting the development of the industry), the social results, network media, and government guidance are the main ways and value indicators for the popularization of environmental policies;
(2) The audience's psychology has the
characteristics of closeness and high
developability. Guided by the audience
psychology, the popularization of environmental policies has the dual effects of practice and theory;
(3) The principle of the environmental policy
popularization based on the audience
psychology is people-oriented. In accordance with the humanistic psychological principle, it develops the environmental policy through the goal planning, step-planning and optimization modest. Then, oriented towards the effect in the popularization of environmental policy, the case and experience teaching sharing are used as the support point for public sharing and motivation.
Acknowledgement
National Social Science Fund Key Bidding Project "Study on Defining the Environmental Responsibility of Hazardous Household Waste and Its Governance Mechanism", Project Grant Number: 16ZDA072, Project leader: Xiaodong Dou.
REFERENCES
Almer, C., & Winkler, R. (2017). Analyzing the effectiveness of international environmental policies: the case of the kyoto protocol. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 82(1), 125-151.
Carraro, C. (2010). Environmental policy and technical change: a survey. International Review
of Environmental and Resource Economics, 4(2),
163-219.
Friedman, J. J. (1953). Psychology of the audience in relation to the architecture of the theater. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 22(4), 561-570. Furnham, A., & Hughes, D. J. (2014). Myths and
misconceptions in popular psychology:
comparing psychology students and the general public. Teaching of Psychology, 41(3), 256-261. Gren, I. M. (2010). Pricing nature, cost-benefit
analysis and environmental policy. European Review of Agricultural Economics, 37(4), 579-581. Griffith, C. R. (1921). A comment upon the
psychology of the audience. Psychological
Monographs, 30(3), 36-47.
Jansen, S., & Brogan, W. A. (2015). Audience psychology and censorship in plato’s republic.
Epoché, 19(2), 205-215.
Lafferty, W., & Hovden, E. (2003). Environmental policy integration: towards an analytical framework. Environmental Politics, 12(3), 1-22. Li, W., Song, G., Beresford, M., & Ma, B. (2011).
China\"s transition to green energy systems: the economics of home solar water heaters and their popularization in dezhou city. Energy Policy, 39(10), 5909-5919.
Parry, I. W. H., & Goulder, L. H. (2008). Instrument
choice in environmental policy. Review of
Environmental Economics and Policy, 2(2), 152-174.
Rasmussen, E., & Ewoldsen, D. R. (2013). dr. phil\r,
and\r, psychology today\r, as self-help
treatments of mental illness: a content analysis of popular psychology programming. Journal of
