Farmers’ Attitudes Towards Organic and Conventional Agriculture: A Behavioural Perspective - Organic Food and Agriculture: New Trends and Developments in the Social Sciences - page 147

by William Kirk in 1952. This approach emphasizes the importance of perception in human
geography, the significance of subjective experience and the potential of people as active
agents in the environment. Fundamental to behavioural approaches is the idea that a crucial
distinction can be drawn between the real world - the world as it is in and of itself - and the
world as perceived, that is the world as humans believe it to be. The behavioural interface is
the black-box within which humans form the image of their world. The schemata, or basic
framework, within which past and present environmental experiences are organised and
given locational meaning is the cognitive mapping process. The key psychological variables
intervening between environment and human behaviour are a mixture of cognitive and
affective attitudes, emotions or affective responses, perception and cognition, and learning
(Golledge & Stimson, 1987).
Behavioural approaches have been used extensively in agricultural geography (Wolpert,
1964; Gasson, 1973, 1974; Gillmor, 1986; Ilbery, 1978, 1985; Brotherton, 1990; Morris & Potter,
1995; Wilson, 1996, 1997; Beedell & Rehman, 1999, 2000; Burton, 2004; Kings & Ilbery, 2010)
and applied to the analysis and 'explanation' of farmers' behaviour. The focus of these
approaches on individual decision makers, together with the possibility of formulating
relatively 'simple' questionnaire and interview-based research methodologies, are the major
reasons why behavioural approaches have been adopted by those seeking to 'understand'
the decision making of farmers. Most importantly, behavioural approaches allow for the
recognition of farmers as independent environmental managers who often make decisions
about the management of environmental resources on their farms independent from the
state or other 'official' environmental managers (Wilson, 1997).
An important aspect of the modified behavioural approach adopted in this chapter is the
way in which the processes of perception and cognition influence farmers' environmental
attitudes, decisions and behaviours. A specific model of environmental behaviour (a variant
of the classic behavioural model) has therefore been developed to facilitate an
environmental understanding of five key themes related to the concept of food security:
pesticides, fossil fuels, agricultural sustainability, GM crops and global climate change (Fig
1). These closely related agri-environmental topics are associated with the working practices
of organic and conventional farmers. Importantly, this type of socio-psychological
framework differs from the classic behavioural approach in its focus on the concepts of
perception and cognition as key parts of the decision making process.
The starting point for this conceptual framework is taken as the 'real world', which is the
source of information. Knowledge is filtered through a system of perceptual receptors which
are essentially the five main senses. Perception is the term given to the neurophysiological
process of the reception of stimuli from an individual's surroundings (Pocock, 1974). In this
process, sight is generally thought to be the major element, but other senses such as hearing
and smell may also play their part. Perception is usually regarded as being immediate i.e. it
follows directly upon the stimulus, and is stimulus-dependent since the nature and very
presence of the perception depends on the existence and type of stimulus.
Cognition is the wider personal context of perception (Pocock, 1974). It is not necessarily
immediate in the same way, since it constitutes the means of awareness that intervenes
between past and present stimuli and the behavioural responses of the present and the
future. The whole complex of cultural response, such as memory, experience, values,
evaluation, judgement and discourse, is present in the processes of cognition. Meaning is
given to information through an interaction between the individual's value system and their
stored 'image' or cognitive map knowledge of the real world. The remaining filtered