Abstract
The majority of the public in Hong Kong have repeatedly told pollsters that they believe environmental problems have become very serious in the city. They are, however, at the same time, highly skeptical about the actual degree of concern felt by their neighbors, friends and relatives. Their belief that only they themselves are environmentally conscious but not the others probably stems from the fact that people in Hong Kong tend to, unconsciously, think about the concept of “environment” at several different spatial scales and, unknowingly, switch between these spatial scales in evaluating their own environmental attitudes and behavior and those of other people around them. In the end, their scepticism is further reinforced by, or is a logical extension of, their own mental model of nature, where an emerging social norm on the importance of protecting nature is eclipsed by a fatalistic mood among the public, on the one hand, and the pragmatic concerns of the elite with economics, on the other.
