Environmental concern among Chinese youth: the roles of knowledge and cultural bias

This article uses Cultural Theory (CT) to complement the Knowledge Deficit Model (KDM) in explaining the environmental concern of Chinese youth. We use a large-scale nationwide sample and adopt multiple multi-level models. We find that the effect of knowledge varies with measurements of knowledge and environmental concern. Youth whose cultural orientation is dominated by egalitarianism are most concerned, followed by those for whom hierarchy is dominant, while those for whom individualism and fatalism are dominant are least concerned. As expected, egalitarianism increases environmental concern while fatalism decreases it, and hierarchism also increases national concern. But, contrary to expectations, individualism has no effect on either and hierarchism does not increase personal concern. We suggest how to educate culturally diverse youth about environmental risk. As one of the first efforts to operationalize CT for survey research in China, this article also suggests how to improve measurement of CT there. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2022.2033705 .