The ways people interact with and view nature speak volumes as to how the Earth is treated, and the severity of environmental concerns rising makes what shapes people's view of nature a pertinent topic. Understanding how and why people might be motivated to protect nature is no small feat. Researchers have been able to present a study on 745 Japanese participants using three types of nature's value—intrinsic, relational, and instrumental—to categorize a method to fully appreciate what goes into the construction of a human's relationship with nature.
Researchers published results in Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology in December 2025.
The three values used in this study are intrinsic, instrumental and relational. Intrinsic refers to the idea that nature has inherent worth regardless of human use or perception, and represents a non-human-centered view. Instrumental is a reference to placing value in nature as an instrument or resource for humans. Relational value refers to an understanding of the value of nature based on how humans and nature are related to each other.
"We found that valuing the relationship between humans and nature is strongly linked to attributing agency to nonhuman beings, while placing greater importance on the intrinsic value of nature is associated with rejecting human-centered thinking. These findings suggest that views of nature do not exist in isolation, but are connected to cultural, social, and psychological perspectives," said Ryosuke Nakadai, researcher and author of the study.
The interpretation of nature and its value to an individual or a population represents that individual or population's holistic experience across various aspects of their lives. The data backs this up, showing that relational value to nature is associated with traditional religious-oriented worldviews. Additionally, relational value also has a strong link to psychological scales used to assess human-nature relationships. These scales include "connectedness to nature" which is an evaluation of the individual's emotions when it comes to the natural world, as well as "identity fusion", representing a feeling of connectedness between self and the natural world.
Another key finding is that all three types of nature's value, intrinsic, relational, and instrumental, are clearly differentiated in the Japanese sample, consistent with patterns previously reported in Western studies.
A positive correlation between relational value and people who believe in animism or anthropomorphism (attributing human-like traits to non-human entities) is in line with the researchers' predictions. Intrinsic values appear to correlate negatively with anthropocentrism and positively correlate with the connectedness to nature scale, also supporting researchers' predictions. Contrarily, there did not appear to be a correlation to instrumental value and those who have more anthropocentric, or human-centered, values.
Researchers are interested in expanding this research across different cultures and countries to see what is universal and what perspectives could be unique culturally. This information will serve the ultimate purpose of determining the best ways to appeal to people to create effective policies and conservation efforts.
Wakaba Tateishi of the Department of Business Administration at Hokkaido Musashi Women's University, Yo Nakawake of the Graduate School of Advanced Science and Technology at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, Shuhei Fujii of the Organization for the Advancement of Research and Development at Kokugakuin University, Shota Shibasaki of the Faculty of Culture and Information Science at Dashisha University and Ryosuke Nakadai of the Faculty of Environment and Information Sciences at YOKOHAMA National University and the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature contributed to this research.
The Research Institute for Humanity and Nature and the Asahi Glass Foundation made this research possible.
