Effect of cognitive-affective factors on people’s conservation behavior: A case study

People's participation is one of the most fundamental inputs required for any conservation effort to succeed. However, due to socio-economic reasons, such as diffused benefits, indiscriminate use of resources offers better economic returns than conservation, lack of trust in conservation programs, and perception that such programs are the government’s oversight in their lives, many of these initiatives do not interest people. All this requires a positive change in their behavior. Here, we used the model proposed by Long et al (2025) to analyze the effect of some psychometric variables on people’s conservation behavior. We found that environmental responsibility and risk perception have a positive impact on people’s conservation emotion. However, the effect of positive emotion on people’s conservation attitude does not hold for the entire population but for certain subgroups. Neither the awareness campaign nor the Access and Benefits Sharing (ABS) had a moderating effect on the positive emotions and conservation attitude, except for certain subgroups. This suggests that for different sections of society, approaches that can be used to modify their conservation behavior vary. To develop an effective integrative conservation approach, we need different path models for different strata of society. In our case, risk perception (RP) resulted in positive conservation emotion (PE), which positively affected people’s environmental responsibility (ER). And, which in its turn, is positively moderated by ECC and ABS to modify people’s conservation attitude.