An outdoor cat can damage your sustainability cred

A new study shows that bird lovers who allow their pet cats out of the house are judged to be less concerned about the environment by other members of the birder community on social media, even if the property owner is otherwise employing all of the same sustainable practices as those keeping cats indoors.

"We thought this was a very interesting opportunity to study group norm violations," said Hwanseok Song, a fifth-year doctoral student in communication at Cornell University and the paper's lead author. "What happens within this community when they see one of their members violate an important group norm? Do people notice cues that a member within their community is letting their cat outdoors? Do these people who notice those cues actually use that information to make judgments on that group-norm violator?"

To explore these questions, Song and his collaborators used Habitat Network (originally named yardmap.org), a socially networked mapping application that allows users to create and share virtual maps of their properties that highlight their sustainability efforts, essentially a show-and-tell for good conservation practices. The researchers created two identical profiles of a pro-environmental property with a small lawn, low chemical usage and solar panels. The only difference between the profiles: One version had an icon and an image indicating an indoor pet cat and the other an outdoor pet cat. Outdoor cats are a divisive issue for many nature lovers because of the threat they pose to wildlife, particularly birds.

Habitat Network users were asked to rate each property owner's level of sustainability. The researchers found that participants who didn't own cats negatively judged property owners with an outdoor cat and even considered them significantly less likely to engage in a variety of pro-environmental behaviors, even though the maps made it clear these property owners had invested in solar power and used few chemicals on their lawns.

"Everything else in this map is pretty much signaling that this is a person already quite committed to sustainability causes. It usually takes a strong environmental commitment to install a solar panel. These findings say a lot about how we make judgments of others who are either violating, or complying with, these sometimes-parochial norms," said Song.

"This study is a reminder of how easy it can be to jump to conclusions about other people's behaviors on the basis of very little information," added Poppy McLeod, professor of communication, who co-authored the paper.

The study's findings have strong implications for online citizen-science projects that unite the sustainability community. While these projects can foster a sense of group solidarity and shared goals, unspoken biases and misperceptions could weaken progress in these projects.