Environmental decisions and policies are often depicted as having win-lose trade-offs with humanity's ability to thrive. These zero-sum beliefs about the relationship between nature and humanity (ZSB-NH) have significant implications for how individuals behave concerning our natural environment. However, no measure exists to operationalise this construct. The aim of this paper thus is to develop and validate a scale that can reliably measure people's zero-sum beliefs about the human-environment relationship. This research provides a theoretical approach to the measurement of ZSB-NH, in which three studies (total = 1921) assess the factor structure, reliability, and validity of the scale. In Australian samples, our initial pool of items was tested and refined into a final 6-item scale, and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted twice in two subsequent studies to assess construct validity. The final scale demonstrated excellent internal reliability across all three studies, while convergent, discriminant, and concurrent validity was also supported. Unexpectedly, zero-sum beliefs in human relationships were found to be unrelated to the ZSB-NH. The predictive utility of ZSB-NH was also demonstrated, where hierarchical multiple regression analyses show the ZSB-NH accounts for unique variance in human pro-social intentions and pro-environmental behaviours, with medium effect sizes. Overall, the ZSB-NH promises to be a useful empirical tool when concerned with understanding barriers to supporting human pro-social and pro-environmental actions.

中文翻译：

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自然与人类零和信念量表的发展

环境决策和政策通常被描述为与人类繁荣发展能力之间的输赢权衡。这些关于自然与人类关系的零和信念 (ZSB-NH) 对于个人如何对待我们的自然环境具有重大影响。然而，不存在任何措施来实施这一结构。因此，本文的目的是开发和验证一个能够可靠地衡量人们对人类与环境关系的零和信念的量表。本研究提供了测量 ZSB-NH 的理论方法，其中三项研究（总计 = 1921 项）评估了量表的因子结构、信度和效度。在澳大利亚样本中，我们对最初的项目池进行了测试，并将其细化为最终的 6 项目量表，并在随后的两项研究中进行了两次验证性因素分析，以评估结构有效性。最终量表在所有三项研究中都表现出了出色的内部可靠性，同时也支持收敛效度、判别效度和并发效度。出乎意料的是，人们发现人际关系中的零和信念与 ZSB-NH 无关。ZSB-NH 的预测效用也得到了证明，分层多元回归分析显示，ZSB-NH 解释了人类亲社会意图和亲环境行为的独特方差，具有中等效应大小。总体而言，在了解支持人类亲社会和亲环境行动的障碍时，ZSB-NH 有望成为一个有用的实证工具。