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high, demand management programs might appeal to people's personal identity and
sense of prestige by instilling conservation (rather than consumption) as a social
standard or norm. By fostering the expectation of stewardship, residents could
be encouraged to conserve water through water-efficient irrigation practices,
the use of pool covers, or other means targeted to interests in achieving social
status and respect. While monetary incentives are less likely to work in wealthy
neighborhoods in which people can bear the costs of consumptive lifestyles,
recognition-based stewardship programs or mandates on wasteful water use
practices might be relatively effective ways to reduce water use.
Overall, specifically targeting conservation strategies based on the character-
istics of neighborhoods can enhance the success of programs that aim to reduce
water demand, especially considering that water use varies spatially along with
neighborhood-level determinants of consumption (Wentz and Gober
2007
). For
instance, while lot size was most critical in wealthy areas to the northeast and south
of downtown Phoenix, the presence of pools in the urban center especially lead to
increased demand locally, perhaps due to the urban heat island's effect on water
demand (Guhathakurta and Gober
2007
). Such spatial patterns are considered in our
typology analysis, but first, the role of attitudinal judgments in determining demand
and enhancing conservation is explained.
2.2.3 Perceptions and Human-Ecological Judgments
In addition to demographic and structural characteristics of households, residents'
perceptions and other subjective judgments may also affect water consumption and
conservation behaviors. Balling and Gober (
2007
) reason that people's outdoor
irrigation practices are determined more by how much water they think their
landscape needs than by actual vegetation needs. Broadly, attitude theory distin-
guishes between three types of judgments that potentially influence human behavior
(for reviews, see Dunlap and Jones
2002
and Larson et al.
2011
): affective or
emotional responses to particular phenomena, such as concern about water scarcity;
cognitive judgments about the way the world works, including beliefs about how
people impact the environment; and, conative or behavioral attitudes that reflect
people's intentions to act in a certain way, for example, to conserve water. Previous
research has illustrated that concern about water scarcity does not lead to dimin-
ished water use in Phoenix, AZ (Harlan et al.
2009
). Similarly, affective judgments
about the importance of conservation did not lead to reduced water consumption in
a San Antonio, TX study (De Oliver
1999
). Yet others have shown that positive
attitudes about behaviors, along with a sense of efficacy and other cognitive
judgments, lead to conservation practices in at least some cases (Trumbo and
O'Keefe
2001
; Corral-Verdugo and Pinheiro
2006
).
In our research, we assess cognitive perceptions about the amount of water
residents' use relative to others, since these judgments might influence water use
behaviors while also potentially hindering conservation efforts. As Corral-Verdugo
and Pinheiro (
2006
) report, people who perceived others as wasting water were less
