Accumulated research findings show that women tend to express higher levels of concern toward technology and the environment than do men, but that the tendency is not universal. The findings are particularly clear-cut for local facilities and/or nuclear and other technologies that are often seen as posing nisks of contamination; findings appear to be more mixed for broader patterns of environmental concern. Although the differing patterns have been reported with enough consistency to be considered relatively robust, less progress has been (...) made to date in explaining the underlying dynamics. Five main hypotheses can be identified. One hypothesis, the expectation that increased knowledge will lead to decreased concern, has received so little support, despite repeated examination, that it can be discarded. Another, that women tend to express greater concern than do men about the health and safety implications of any given level of technological risk, has received consistent support. The remaining 3 hypotheses require additional empincal examination. (shrink)

Strategies that provide information about the environmental impact of activities are increasingly seen as effective to encourage conservation behavior. This article offers the most comprehensive meta-analysis of information based energy conservation experiments conducted to date. Based on evidence from 156 published field trials and 525,479 study subjects from 1975 to 2012, we quantify the energy savings from information based strategies. On average, individuals in the experiments reduced their electricity consumption by 7.4%. Our results also show that strategies providing individualized audits (...) and consulting are comparatively more effective for conservation behavior than strategies that provide historical, peer comparison energy feedback. Interestingly, we find that pecuniary feedback and incentives lead to a relative increase in energy usage rather than induce conservation. We also find that the conservation effect diminishes with the rigor of the study, indicating potential methodological issues in the current literature. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. (shrink)