Hazard of Human Activity

Human behaviours is a key threat to conservation, this has contributed to habitat loss through deforestation, conurbations among others, climate change by causing changes in Earth’s atmosphere in the amounts of greenhouse gases and aerosols (small particles). The largest known contribution comes from the burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide gas to the atmosphere. Human behaviour is due to underlying cognitive, emotional and physiological processes. Its concepts like actions, activities and behaviours contribute to understanding human behaviour [10].

Actions are temporally short and conscious muscular movements made by the users (e.g., taking a key, opening the door of a vehicle,grasping etc.).

Some Actions are visible like above while others are hidden such as (perceptions, attitudes, thoughts, feelings and physiological processes); Activities are temporally longer but finite and are composed of several actions (e.g., cutting down trees, poaching , driving a car, etc.) and Behaviours describe how the user performs these activities at different times such as Inattentive drivers found of over speeding and scanning through the bush for wildlife for fear of being attacked by the vertebrates [3].

Social psychologists believe that attitudes contribute to human behavior theory such as what people think and what they do. They rely majorly on Attitude-based Questionnaire by Aizen and Fishbein’s [28] .

This attitude-based Questionnaire has four components that eliminates the difficulty in recognizing the attitude-behavior relationship. The components are; beliefs, attitudes, intentions and behaviours. The theory of Reasoned Action and Planned behavior suggest that a person’s health behavior is determined by their intention to perform a behavior .

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Human decision making is characterized by a person’s attitude toward the behavior, subjective norms regarding the behavior and a person’s perceived control over the behavior. /cite St.John2011. Psychologists define Attitude as a tendency of an individual to evaluate an entity (person, place, behavior or thing) with a degree of favor or disfavor’. Attitude towards an object is not related to the attitude to behavior towards that object. For example, someone may have a favorable attitude towards a rhino (the object), but will go ahead and engage in poaching (the behavior towards the object) because they want the rhino horn which is believed to be medicinal. A subjective norm is what we think other people will think of us if we do (or do not do) the behaviour. These are a result of social and environmental surroundings. It is a function of social norms and taboos and the motivation to comply with what a significant person (e.g. village elder, father or religious leader) thinks is appropriate behaviour.

Generally, positive attitude and positive subjective norms result in greater perceived control and increase the likelihood of intentions governing changes in behavior. Perceived behavioral control refers to a person’s perception of the ease or difficulty of performing the behavior of interest. Perceived behavioral control varies across situations and actions, which results in a person having varying perceptions of behavioral control depending on the situation.