Environmental Issue is caused by the human interference that result in harmful effects to the environment. The most talked about, being pollution. There are many forms of pollution happening around the whole world. One type of pollution that I will be discussing about is water pollution.
Water pollution occurs when water is being contaminated by human activities. The contaminated water contains chemicals that can harm the marine life. Marine debris such as plastic bags and plastic straws that humans used every day are especially known to kill the sea creatures. I consistently come across pictures or videos of sea creatures being hurt on social media and it upsets me knowing that we were behind all of this. The plastic waste in the ocean keeps increasing which in turn more sea creatures getting harmed.
Implicit attitudes refer to attitudes that are unavailable to our conscious awareness that you cannot control even if you are aware it. My implicit attitude towards the environment if that I felt upset when I visited places that has lots of trash. I can recall this feeling when I visited the beaches at Bali during my holiday. This is an implicit attitude because the trash on the Bali beaches may have unconsciously reminded me of seeing videos of sea creatures being hurt due to trash in seawater that I watched previously.
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Sadness was the first thing that I felt, and I cannot control it. Another implicit attitude of mine is that I feel that eco-friendly products are too expensive. This is an implicit attitude because seeing prices higher than normal may have unconsciously reminded me of I used to just buy products at its lowest price possible and would have avoided the pricey ones like the eco-friendly packages. On the other hand, explicit attitudes refer to attitudes that we are consciously aware of which makes it easy to report.
There are attitudes that a person that the person chose to show when interacting with others. An example that displays my explicit attitude is that I encourage more brands that make use of eco-friendly packaging. This is an explicit attitude as it was aware to me and I would like to show to other people that I support brands with eco-friendly packages.
Implicit Bias is when our implicit and explicit opposes each other. While my explicit attitude is to encourage brands to make use of eco-friendly, my implicit attitude makes me feels that the product that consist of eco-friendly packages may be too expensive. Since both conflict with one another, I have an implicit bias.
There are three different parts of an attitude cognitively-based, behaviourally-based and actively-based attitudes. Cognitive based-attitudes involves the beliefs and knowledge towards the attitude object. Behaviourally-based attitudes involve actions towards the attitude object. Affective based attitude involves feelings and emotion towards the attitude object. I believe that my attitude towards this environmental issue is more towards affective-based because the feeling of sadness and pity I had towards the sea creatures that were being hurt have led me to educate myself more about water pollution. From there, I become more vigilant and caring to the water bodies around us.
This poster was made by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to raise awareness of water pollution caused by plastic materials. It shows a water bottle that was thrown in the sea. There two different routes of persuasion which is the Central Route and Peripheral Route. Central Route of Persuasion is done using arguments or content of the message. It makes the audience to think and listen carefully about the argument or the content message. Therefore, the Central Route is more effective for audience who have the time to think about the message.
If the argument or message is strong, the advertisement can change the audiences’ attitude. However, Peripheral Routes is done using peripheral cues instead of an argument. In this case, this advertisement makes more use of more Peripheral Route than Central Route to raise awareness for water pollution to the audience. This is because advertisement has very little information and no statistics or facts was used. Since it only displays an image and a few words, it does not require much time for the audience to get the message. Thus, showing that this advertisement is taking the Peripheral Route.
Advertisements can manipulate our attitudes using Emotions, Fear or Stereotyping. Emotions play a huge part in influencing the audience attitude towards the object. With the use of emotion, it sets the tone of the advertisement. For instance, when advertisement wants to evoke a feeling of sadness to the audience, the advertisement can display negative actions such as someone crying. We use emotions as heuristics to help us determine our attitude easier. To show you what I mean, pretend that you and your friends are having a perfect day in beach.
The sun is shining brightly, and you feel wind breezing lightly while hearing soothing waves crashing on the shores, but you suddenly noticed that there were litters on the other side of beach. Normally the sight of litters would make you feel disgusted. However, on that day, you felt so happy and relaxed that you choose just to ignore it and continue enjoying. In this case, the positive emotions of the person have led him to have a neglectful attitude towards the pollution. This shows how emotions can act as heuristics to determine the attitude. Fear can also be used to persuade audience to change their attitude or behaviours. Fear is dependent on one’s self esteem.
It is more effective for people with lower self-esteem as they would try to completely avoid the situation, whereas people with high self-esteem would try face situation. Drug advertisement commonly used fear to prevent people to consume it. If the person did not follow and consumed it, their health can be harmed. Thus, this fear of their own health can change their attitudes. Lastly, stereotyping can also change the person attitude. Due to watching similar commercials, it seems normal and not wrong for people to think of a certain stereotype for different types of people. For example, advertisements of household goods usually show scenes of females using instead of men. Thus, this led to the idea or stereotyping of women doing all the housework being generalised to us and change our attitudes towards them.
This WWF advertisement uses fear and emotions to further emphasize the message that it wants to come across. The bottle may appear harmless to us but to the sea creatures underwater, it is like a nuke to them. Nuke symbolises destruction and death, thus, implying that the plastic in seas can lead to a huge disaster to the sea and fishes. The advertisement uses emotion because it makes the audience feel sad and pity for the fishes that was affected due to the trash we throw. The advertisement uses fear because it makes us feel worried and scared for the sea and fishes in the future if this carries on. The nuke also plays a part in causing as fear because we are terrified of it. From this, WWF would hope that the public will feel more concern and aware of the environment and take actions to minimise water pollution.
I feel that this advertisement has been impactful and reinforced my attitude towards water pollution. As mentioned earlier, I have more of an affective attitude towards water pollution which makes me more aware of the situation. In this case, however, this advertisement brings more of a behavioural attitude towards water pollution. This is impactful because I start to take actions in stopping water pollution instead of just feeling sorry for the sea creatures. I researched more about WWF organisation that was on the advertisement and found out that I can volunteer to raise awareness in water pollution. Knowing this, I would like to take a huge step in helping to stop water pollution by signing up for it. Thus, this shows I have more of a behavioural-based attitude now and how impactful the advertisement was to me.
