Explicating the role of personal ethics in public engagement (2022)

Making citizens go green is a hard job. Public engagement regarding environmental issues such as climate change, recycling, no matter how threatening the lay citizens' ordinary life and future, is challenging. People simply ignore problems unless individual citizens encounter very problematic situations. The only time people recognize it as a problem is when they find a severe discrepancy between expectation and experience. This research project was started to figure out how we can make the public engaged in environmental issues. The approach is integrating theories of problem solving and personal ethics. For the organization-public relations (OPR) problem, they suggest synthetic public segmentation strategies (e.g., cross-situational and situational characteristics) to identify likely sympathizers of the issues are keys to organizing information campaigns.