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This paper aims to understand farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox and examine the effects of income heterogeneity and social ties in addressing this paradox by employing an instrumental variable probit (IV probit) model. By identifying different forms of attitude–behavior paradoxes, our study seeks to ascertain not only the total effects of income heterogeneity and social ties on farmers’ paradox. We also explore the separate effects of whether income heterogeneity addresses this paradox for “having positive attitude but no behavior” or whether the social ties addresses the farmers’ paradox for “having negative attitude but do have behavior.”
The remaining paper is structured as follows: Section 2 explores the mechanisms of farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox, Section 3 explains the theoretical and conceptual framework, Section 4 describes the study area and methods, Section 5 presents the empirical results, Section 6 discusses the results, and Section 7 concludes the study. 2. Mechanisms of Farmers’ Attitude–Behavior ParadoxThe provision of small-scale irrigation facilities often demands substantial investment. However, the farming system in the Northern China is characterized as a smallholder farming system. Without large stakeholders being involved, smallholders simply cannot afford such a huge investment. Collective action for small-scale irrigation facilities has been promoted by national governments and international organizations. Despite the advantages of collective action, in providing public goods, and fostering community development, the initiation and sustenance of collective action faces formidable challenges, that is, the farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox toward collective action.
Understanding how stakeholders frame their decision-making process for collective action is a prerequisite for deciphering the farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox. As the main participants, multiple types of stakeholders interact in common-pool resource management settings, and they hold competing or conflicting attitudes owing to individual endowment characteristics, information asymmetry, and confined social interactions. The paradox originates from the fact that an individual’s utility-maximizing strategy does not automatically lead to an optimal collective welfare optimum—that is, “the individual utility vs. collective welfare dilemma” [4].Therefore, integrating individual and collective utility is the key to address farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox. Collective action is assumed to take place and sustain under circumstances where public interests can fit with private interests. To find a compromise between farmers’ attitude and behavior lies in how versatile stakeholders with different endowments are embedded in social structures, and how incentives and information interact to strike a balance between private and collective interests to achieve desired outcomes.
To reveal the mechanisms of the attitude–behavior paradox, allowing for sub-divisions would be a better approach to understand these differences. We thus divided farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox into two forms: farmers who have a positive attitude but not the desired behavior and farmers who have a negative attitude but do have the desired behavior.
2.1. Farmers Who “Have Positive Attitude but No Behavior”For those farmers who have a positive attitude but not the desired behavior, decisions against collective action represent a social dilemma situation [26]. For farmers to exhibit the desired behavior depends on whether it will enable them to simultaneously “get their share of the accepted collective goal and to maximize individual utility” [4]. Previous studies demonstrate that actors with larger endowments who are proponents of shared resources usually act as “elites” and play an active role in the initiation of collective action [27]. In this sense, heterogeneity is crucial in addressing the social dilemmas of collective action [23]. However, many studies have shown that economic heterogeneity is multi-faceted; different aspects of heterogeneity may affect different types of collective actions and these effects are moderated by complex contextual factors. In this sense, income heterogeneity can be taken as an important variable that may influence stakeholders’ ability and/or incentive to undertake the initiatives of collective action, that is, material payoffs will stimulate them to act in a collective-oriented way, thus generating motivations for altering behaviors [7,28]. 2.2. Farmers Who Have Negative Attitude but Do Have BehaviorThe structural effects of social behavior highlight the role of social ties in motivating knowledge sharing, resource mobilization, and making mutually advantageous decisions in collective action [29,30,31]. When individuals’ participating behavior engaging in collective action is contingent upon others, how each participant triggers others until the chain reaction reaches the threshold to initiate collective action is the key to overcome this type of attitude–behavior paradox. The outcomes depend on the network of social ties that channel the chain reactions [32]. Regarding the homogeneous or heterogeneous contentions between weak ties and strong ties [33], some scholars maintain that both social ties are important [34,35], while others argue that weak ties are more effective than strong ones in predicting desired outcomes [33,36]. In fact, social ties influence farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox in different ways—being behavior-directed or attitude-directed, depending on the structural properties of social ties (weak ties or strong ties) as well as stakeholders’ strategies, searching for individual utility maximization and/or collective welfare maximization [37,38]. Stakeholders could alter their behavior or attitude by embedding in the structure of social interactions to understand what strategy best satisfies their interests, or strong ties may have direct influence to change an individual’s interests and internal motivations toward participation through social pressures [39,40]. 3. Theoretical FrameworkBased on the analysis above, overcoming social dilemmas and sustaining the collective action of small-scale irrigation facilities depend on how to reconcile farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox; income heterogeneity and social ties are potentially transformative ingredients in altering the farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox. Figure 1 demonstrates this relationship between the dependent and independent variables and the hypothesized signs of these relationships.Income heterogeneity is often perceived to influence collective action in situations where stakeholders may or may not have a common interest in regulating the use of common-pool resources [41]. Income heterogeneity is defined as the earnings inequality across individuals and it is closely related to individuals’ motivation to overcome social dilemmas and contribution in collective action [42]. However, the effect of income heterogeneity is ambiguous, as income heterogeneity is often associated with the distribution of benefits from the management of a common-pool resource and the alternative income earning opportunities (e.g., off-farm income). For example, increasing inequality could stimulate major resource users to contribute for reaping more benefits and simultaneously encourage small users to free-ride [43], whereas alternative income earning opportunities outside common-pool resources may also reduce higher-income users’ incentive to participate in collective action [44]. To overcome social dilemmas, income heterogeneity is thus deemed effective in fostering actors who have commons interest to transform attitudes into behaviors, by gaining more of the positive externalities. Therefore, we hypothesize the following:H1a:Income heterogeneity is negatively associated with farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox.
Based on the rational choice theory, farmers’ decisions on whether to participate in collective action are a consequence of how they calculate the benefits and costs. For the farmers who have positive attitude but no behavior, expectations that the benefits they receive will exceed the costs they pay will motivate them to transform their attitudes into participative behavior. Income heterogeneity may thus lead farmers to behave differently to make decisions, depending on how strongly the economic incentives to make these material benefits transform into participative behavior. We argue that income heterogeneity explains a substantial portion of this type of paradox for farmers who have positive attitudes but no behavior. Hence, we propose the following hypothesis:
H1b:Income heterogeneity is negatively associated with paradox for farmers who have positive attitudes but no behavior.
In addition to material benefits, farmers are also driven by solidarity benefits, including rewards such as socializing, congeniality, the sense of group membership and identification, status resulting from membership, fun and conviviality, and the maintenance of social distinctions [45]. To obtain these benefits, farmers may strategically adjust or frame their attitudes or behaviors by social ties through information exchange, knowledge sharing, and social learning [46]. Thus, they can be aligned to homogenous or heterogeneous ties to pursue desired outcomes of collective action [47]. Therefore, we propose the following hypothesis:H2a:Social ties are negatively associated with farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox.
The embeddedness of weak or strong ties in social structures can be regarded as a mechanism to encourage individuals to engage in frequent interactions and facilitate information circulation; it allows them to access collective action, and to influence, negotiate, and bargain to reach their desired objectives [48,49]. Therefore, farmers’ attitudes can be altered by weak ties to acquire potential gains from other socially distant actors and to take advantage of the benefits not available within a highly clustered network [50]. Strong ties have the advantage of high-quality information exchange. Social norms and sanctions aligning with public interests are then generated in this process, which, in turn, addresses this paradox for farmers who have negative attitude but do have behavior [51]. In general, to compromise this type of paradox, farmers adapt themselves to permeate outward and transform their local contexts into wider ones by enacting interactions of networks and meta-networks to alter attitudes [52,53]. Therefore, we hypothesize the following:H2b:Social ties are negatively associated with farmers’ paradox for having negative attitude but do have behavior.
Previous studies demonstrated that inequality generates distinct group identities such as social classes, increasing income heterogeneity is more likely to intensify social heterogeneity which affects cooperation [54]. As economic incentives “may favor behaviors that nevertheless do not occur unless information (social ties) makes individuals aware that the incentive is available” [22], we mainly focus on how strong ties and weak ties linked to income heterogeneity, and its influence on farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox. According to Briggs [55], social support is associated with strong ties, which tend to provide emotional and instrumental support for daily life. Networks composed of weak ties that offer social leverage help individuals to change their opportunity structure for advancement, both of these ties are beneficial for resources access, and these ties can cut across race, ethnicity, and/or social class [56]. However, compared to high-income farmers who have more connections with dispersed and heterogeneous social networks, low-income farmers are more inclined to be constrained by the homogeneity of the strong ties, the similar information and resources circulated, limiting the opportunities for circulation of information and access of resource. Therefore, we formulate the following hypothesis:H3:The interaction terms of social ties and income heterogeneity are negatively related to farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox, the interaction term between weak ties and income heterogeneity is more effective compared to the interaction term between strong ties and income heterogeneity.
4. Study Area and Methods 4.1. Study Area and VariablesA household survey was conducted based on a case study of the Jinghui qu irrigation systems in Shaanxi Province, China. Jinghui qu irrigation system is China’s first modern large-scale irrigation project, which covered 48 towns, 6 counties and 3 cities (Xi’an, Xianyang and Weinan) of 1,465,000 mu (97,666.7 hectares), which is assumed to be representative of irrigation in the northeast of China. A multistage sampling strategy was utilized to select sample households. In each city, two counties differing in geographical location were selected based on their respective position in upstream, middle stream and downstream, that is, Jingyang County, Sanyuan County, Gaoling County, Lintong County, and Yanliang County. Within each county, we applied a stratified random sampling method to select 3 townships, we then randomly selected from a census of villages in each township in the upper, middle, and lower reaches of the canal network within the Jinghui qu irrigation districts. Finally, we randomly selected 8–10 household heads in each village. After excluding those with incomplete responses from 350 copies of the survey, 308 valid questionnaires were selected.
The study area is located in semi-arid districts with a continental monsoon climate, with an average annual rainfall of 399 mm; this rainfall is mainly concentrated in summer and autumn. The uneven distribution of rainfall often resulted in droughts in the spring and summer. In order to combat the drought, farmers cooperate in the form of contributing money or labour for the construction and maintenance of small-scale irrigation facilities. The irrigated areas are flat, and within these areas, the soil is fertile. The main crops are wheat, corn, cotton, and vegetables. The survey contained information on social demographics, management conditions of irrigation, social capital, social ties, and farmers’ attitudes toward collective action for small-scale irrigation facilities. The order and wording of the questions were carefully designed to ensure unbiased identification. As “a weakness of much of this research is the distinction between what survey respondents say and what they actually do” [57], to account for this weakness and avoid social desirability bias, information on participation behavior was collected from the list of irrigation managing committee personnel after the survey interview. 4.2. Measures 4.2.1. Income HeterogeneityAs inequality in wealth or income is often regarded as the main indicator of heterogeneity, and annual income is easily observed at the household level. The household’s relative income position is employed to measure income heterogeneity [58]:RIi=xi−XaveXmax−Xmin
(1)
RIi is the household relative income position in the community, xi is household i’s annual income, and Xave is the average value of the survey data. Xmin is the minimum value of the survey data and Xmax is the maximum value of the survey data.
4.2.2. Social TiesSocial networks can be divided based on their relational and structural characteristics that are attributed to relational (i.e., strong ties and weak ties) and structural aspects (i.e., core networks and periphery networks). Our paper mainly focuses on the relational aspect of social networks which were modeled as weak ties and strong ties; social ties represent the web of social relationships that farmers maintain, including both intimate relationships with family and close friends and more formal relationships with other individuals and groups. It is through this web of social ties that individuals can be socially “integrated” into the larger society in which they live. Therefore, social ties highlight the role of stakeholders’ embeddedness in bridging or bonding networks to compromise the attitude–behavior paradox. The social ties are, thus, an important force to update farmers’ attitudes toward behaviors.
Strong ties represent a dense network that can be delineated as tightly clustered relationships, e.g., kin, neighbors, and intimate friends. These ties could provide instrumental support for small loans, child caring, etc., for ensuring daily basic needs [50]. Weak ties can be characterized as the exchange of information and knowledge among remote connections [59]. Therefore, a strong tie is measured by “the number of people you could ask for help to cope with the inconvenience and difficulties in daily life [60].” A weak tie is measured by “the number of people outside your immediate family and close friends for contacts and acquaintances.” Both of them are measured on a five-point scale which takes the value 1 if the respondent replies one to three, 2 if they reply “four to seven,” 3 if “eight to eleven,” 4 if “twelve and fifteen,” and 5 if “16 and more”. 4.3. Control VariablesContextual elements have been identified to analyze individuals’ attitude–behavior paradox [61,62]. Normally, contextual elements refer to attributes, institutional constraints, and regulatory institutions [63]. Therefore, the control variables we selected were farmers’ social demographics, rules, and institutions. Community rules and institutions were selected to reflect the attributes of the community atmosphere that influence behavior and attitude in human-interactive situations [64]. Previous studies have demonstrated that the sustainability of common-pool resource management is more inclined to occur in a community with shared norms and rules [65]. We thus selected past experiences of water stealing and water use conflicts to reflect the level of rules for managing common-pool resources, as the rules are critical for small-scale irrigation facility construction and maintenance, especially for the rules-in-use by the participants. 4.4. MethodsTo evaluate the effects of social ties and income heterogeneity on farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox for small-scale irrigation facilities collective action, we estimate the following system of equations using a two-stage IV probit model [66]:Yi=α+βXi+χSNi+γRIi+εi
(2)
where Yi is the binary variable that indicates 1 for inconsistency between attitude and behavior and 0 for consistency between attitude and behavior. Attitude–behavior paradox is defined as farmers who have positive attitude but no behavior or farmers who have negative attitude but have behaviour. Attitude–behavior consistency is defined as farmers who have both attitude and behaviour or have negative attitude and no behavior. This variable was estimated by taking the absolute value of the difference between attitude and behavior. Xi is the vector of variables controlling for socio-demographic variables. SNi represents social ties that have the potential for endogeneity. RIi is the relative income position for income heterogeneity. Because it is difficult to find an appropriate regression methodology that can evaluate binary or continuous variables with endogenous variables, a linear structure to the endogenous variable was used to estimate the model [67,68]. Following this structure, the second-stage model is taken, with SNi as the endogenous variable. The first stage of the IV probit model is as follows: where Ci is a vector of exogenous variables and Zi is the vector of instruments, which are highly correlated with the social ties but not correlated with the error term εi. Under the assumption of heterogeneity, the instrument variable should predict social ties, but it should be uncorrelated with outcomes other than through social ties. If Cov(SNi,εi)≠0, social ties under the program are endogenous.We use the bivariate probit model to test for the necessity of recruiting instrument variables. The bivariate probit model tests for the endogeneity of social ties variables to the outcome variable by estimating Cov(SNi,εi) ≠ 0 or Cov(SNi,εi) = 0. If Cov(SNi,εi) = 0, then we cannot reject the null of exogeneity, and the simple probit estimation would be sufficient to gauge the effect. However, if Cov(SNi,εi) ≠ 0, then the endogeneity conditions hold; the IV probit estimation can provide consistent estimates of the effect.
Equations (1) and (2) are the first-stage regressions for measuring the instruments of social ties as well as other control variables in the outcome equation. We thus developed three pairs of models.
Pair A is estimated with the bivariate probit model for strong and weak ties separately.
Pair B is estimated using the IV probit model for strong and weak ties separately.
Pair C is estimated using the IV probit model for strong ties × income heterogeneity and weak ties × income heterogeneity separately.
As Zhou et al. [69] have identified interaction effects between social capital and income disparity, the interaction item constructed here is to explore the joint effects of income heterogeneity and social ties on farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox. 4.5. Instrument Variable of Social TiesEndogeneity of social ties has been validated by a vast amount of literature [70,71,72]. This is mainly because social ties and participation in collective action have reverse causality relationships. For example, farmers with voluminous social ties are more inclined to participate in collective action, while farmers participating in collective action benefit from information exchange and knowledge sharing as well as increased income levels, increasing their inclination for further participation. Moreover, it is difficult to gauge residual confounding, such as unobserved variables including personality and family background, which may also correlate with social ties, when it cannot be argued that explanatory variables are not correlated with the error term. Therefore, it is important to select a decent instrumental variable for two prerequisites to be satisfied: The instrumental variable should not be correlated with the endogenous dependent variable, and it should be correlated with the independent variable other than through other endogenous variables. Therefore, a valid instrumental variable in our case should be correlated with social ties, but have no direct effects on the attitude–behavior paradox other than through social ties. Thus, we used the following instrumental variable methods for parameter estimation:The distance to the provincial or national highways. This variable was selected to explain the relationship between distance and social ties. In rural China, farmers’ houses tend to be located closer to transportation routes such as national roads, so the distance from provincial or highways is closely related to the distribution of housing density and thus affects farmers’ social ties. At the same time, distance from provincial or national highways does not directly affect collective action and satisfies exogeneity. The Spearman correlation demonstrates that distance is not correlated with farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox (Spearman’s ρ = −0.074; p = 0.195), but is correlated with social ties (Spearman’s ρ = 0.112; p = 0.049). The selection of the instrumental variable fits the criteria of relevance and exogeneity.
Whether family members have the experience of metropolitan city migrant working: The selection of the instrumental variable fits the criteria of relevance and exogeneity because family members’ work experience outside the home helps expand farmers’ own social ties, but it is reasonable to assume that family members’ experiences do not directly influence their own small-scale irrigation facilities collective action decision-making. Spearman correlation analysis indicates that migrant working experience was not significantly correlated with the attitude–behavior paradox (Spearman’s ρ = −0.045; p = 0.428), while it was significantly correlated with social ties (Spearman’s ρ = 0.194; p = 0.001).
6. DiscussionOur study arises from the question “Why do farmers not fit their deeds to their words in the collective action for small-scale irrigation facilities?” To answer this question, we explored the mechanisms of how stakeholders interact in different forms of attitude–behavior paradoxes (having positive attitude but no behavior and having negative attitude but having behavior) and thereafter examined the effects of income heterogeneity and social ties on farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox. On the whole, the complexity of the attitude–behavior paradox lies not only in the heterogeneous interests of stakeholders, but also the social structures formulated by social ties to reinforce or attenuate this inconsistency. Therefore, to address the attitude–behavior paradox, one needs to understand how income heterogeneity and social ties separately and interactively played a role in transforming or adapting to behaviors.
The first key finding is that our study reveals the socio-economic nature of farmers’ decision-making processes. A theoretical framework that explores the origins of the paradox is necessary. Our findings demonstrate that individual–collective utility inconsistencies lead to farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox, given that “individual utility depends not only on individual well-being, but also the well-being of the community to which the individual belongs” [84]. Future work examining other domains of attitude–behavior paradoxes, individual–collective utility may serve as a useful theorem to further understand the causal factors and mechanisms that reconcile such a paradox in typical populations.Another novel finding from our research is that income heterogeneity and social ties could reconcile farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox. Income heterogeneity and social ties work differently when deciphering farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox into “farmers who have positive attitude but no behavior” and “farmers who have negative attitude but do have behavior”. Accordingly, farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox could be altered by increasing economic incentives and by embedding into weak and strong ties for social support and social leverage, to integrate individual and collective utility. Moreover, our research also underlines the interaction effect of income heterogeneity and social ties, which may expand the potential limits of economic or social effects to address the attitude–behavior paradox.
7. ConclusionsWe employed the IV probit model to examine the effects of social ties and income heterogeneity on farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox for the collective action of small-scale irrigation facilities in Northwest China. We found that the attitude–behavior paradox can be reconciled by income heterogeneity and social ties. Farmers can achieve attitude–behavior consistency that is conditioned by how individuals embed themselves into different social ties to align common-pool resources, thus to maximize and integrate individuals as well as collective utilities. Our findings also suggest that stressing behavior or attitude change, while ignoring rules and community environment, will lead to unintended consequences aggravating the attitude–behavior paradox. Strategies that compromise the attitude–behavior paradox should create circumstances of rules and institutions where public interests can be combined with private interests.
Our study contributes to the theoretical framework of collective action research and has implications for developing economic incentives and social structures interventions to address the attitude–behavior paradox. Our result is important not only for common-pool resource domains of collective actions and social dilemmas, but also for other complex contexts involving various stakeholders to cooperate and achieve desired outcomes. Insights from this research demonstrate important policy implications for overcoming the farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox. Understanding the mechanisms of farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox can help policymakers to effectively alleviate failures in collective action and understand the micro-foundations of individual choice-making processes to overcome social dilemmas.
First, interventions could be directed to enhance income heterogeneity to promote elites’ contribution by altering their behavior to gain additional benefits of collective action, which are crucial for developing countries due to the externalities of the common-pool resources and many stakeholders competing for those resources. Second, participatory and action-led values and conventions are emphasized to expand both the weak and strong ties, providing the opportunities for policy interventions to promote the initiatives of social groups, cooperatives, and networks that can serve as a channel for information exchange and social learning. Finally, stressing behavior or attitude change alone, while ignoring rules and the community atmosphere, will lead to unintended consequences that aggravate the attitude–behavior paradox. Therefore, externally imposed incentive-compatible mechanisms are necessary to enhance farmers’ cooperative choices.
One limitation of our research is that we mainly explored the farmers’ attitude–behavior paradox from a socioeconomic perspective. A focus only on socioeconomic variables may fail to reveal their relationship with individuals’ attitudes or behaviors, leading to biased results. Future studies that explore the identified relationships should consider potentially confounding variables, such as those independently related to attitudes or behaviors. Interdisciplinary research combining socioeconomic and psychological theories is a future direction.
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