Social Support for Water Quality: The Influence of Values and Symbolic Racism

Many communities, especially minority communities, have to deal with contaminated water supplies. Remediating such risks is usually expensive, so requires action from state and/or federal governments. In turn, this requires political support for provision of a collective good, an altruistic action. We use data from a Mechanical Turk convenience sample to examine the influence of values and beliefs on donations to remediate water quality, using actual donations to an environmental group as our dependent variable. We find that views about minorities are the strongest predictor of donations, with symbolic racism—beliefs that minorities have received advantageous treatment—substantially reducing donations. In addition, altruistic values have an indirect effect of increasing the likelihood of donating while selfinterested values reduce donations. It appears that support for collective action on water quality is closely tied with both altruism and racial views, suggesting links between research on environmental justice and on environmental decision-making.