Ecospirituality Scale

1. Abstract

The Ecospirituality Scale, developed by Matthew I. Billet, Adam Baimel, Sakshi S. Sahakari, Mark Schaller, and Ara Norenzayan (2023), is an empirical instrument designed to operationalize and measure the psychological construct of ecospirituality—the tendency to perceive, experience, and appraise the natural world through a spiritual lens. Although scholars across environmental psychology, anthropology, and religious studies have long posited that viewing nature as sacred or spiritually imbued alters human ecological decision-making, psychometrically validated instruments distinguishing cognitive-theological appraisals from affective, visceral experiences in nature were historically scarce. The scale originated from an initial candidate pool of 38 items encapsulating four theoretical domains: cognitive appraisal of nature’s sacredness, experiential encounters of awe and transcendence in natural settings, broad interconnectedness, and the anthropomorphic agency of the natural environment. Following exploratory factor analysis, parallel analysis, and rigorous item reduction across diverse samples, the instrument was refined into an 8-item, two-factor self-report inventory comprising two balanced dimensions: Appraisal of Nature’s Spiritual Qualities (4 items) and Experience of Nature’s Spiritual Qualities (4 items).

Administered via a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 7 (“strongly agree”), the Ecospirituality Scale exhibits robust psychometric properties demonstrated across eight independent samples collected in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Singapore (totaling thousands of respondents from general public cohorts, university undergraduates, environmental advocacy organizations, and nature clubs). Confirmatory factor analysis verified excellent structural fit for the oblique two-factor configuration (χ² model fit criteria, RMSEA = .048, RMSR = .02, TLI = .99), accounting for 66% of total variance. Internal consistency reliability is high across cultural contexts, with sample-level Cronbach’s α coefficients ranging from .87 to .92 (aggregate mean α = .89) and remarkable 4-month test-retest stability (r = .77, 95% CI [.74, .79]). The instrument demonstrates configural, metric, and scalar measurement invariance across Western and non-Western societies and diverse religious affiliations, while evidencing known-groups, convergent, discriminant, and incremental predictive validity in forecasting moral expansiveness toward ecological entities.

2. Keywords

Ecospirituality, Environmental Psychology, Appraisal of Nature’s Spiritual Qualities, Experience of Nature’s Spiritual Qualities, Awe, Moral Expansiveness, Human-Nature Connectedness, Sacredness, Psychometrics, Measurement Invariance

3. Authors

The Ecospirituality Scale was developed and validated by a collaborative research team based in Canada and the United Kingdom:

• Matthew I. Billet (Corresponding Author)
  • ORCID: 0000-0001-5768-574X
  • Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
  • Contact Address: Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada
  • Email: [email protected]
• Adam Baimel
  • ORCID: 0000-0002-2629-7952
  • Affiliation: Centre for Psychological Research, School of Psychology, Oxford Brookes University, Headington Campus, Oxford, United Kingdom
• Sakshi S. Sahakari
  • ORCID: 0009-0008-0713-0330
  • Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Mark Schaller
  • ORCID: 0000-0003-1243-4650
  • Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Ara Norenzayan
  • Affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Ecospirituality Scale is to provide a standardized, psychometrically rigorous, and parsimonious instrument for quantifying how individuals conceptualize, experience, and attribute spiritual significance to the non-human natural environment. Historically, psychological assessments examining human interactions with nature have concentrated primarily on secular metrics: utilitarian attitudes, biosocial values, environmental concern (such as the New Ecological Paradigm), or cognitive-affective identification with nature (e.g., the Connectedness to Nature Scale, Nature Relatedness Scale). While these constructs measure an individual’s perceived closeness to ecological systems, they largely circumvent the explicit attribution of sanctity, transcendence, and spiritual essence to the natural realm. Conversely, traditional psychometric scales of spirituality and religiosity frequently focus on anthropocentric theism, institutional dogmas, or disembodied metaphysical forces, neglecting the biophysical world as a legitimate locus of the sacred.

The Ecospirituality Scale bridges this conceptual void by isolating nature-focused spiritual cognitions and phenomenology from institutional religious adherence. From a theoretical perspective, developing this scale addresses key inquiries regarding the cultural evolutionary functions of belief systems: does perceiving nature as sacred motivate human conservation behaviors beyond pragmatic resource management? Research indicates that when an object, territory, or ecosystem is moralized through sacred appraisal, it becomes protected by deontological constraints, rendering it immune to mundane cost-benefit trade-offs. The scale allows researchers to examine how spiritual perceptions of ecosystems alter moral decision-making, pro-environmental altruism, and ecological grief.

In applied research, the instrument serves cross-disciplinary functions across environmental sociology, behavioral economics, conservation biology, and clinical health psychology. In empirical conservation campaigns, public communicators can utilize the scale to evaluate baseline environmental attitudes across diverse demographics, enabling community-specific outreach that aligns with local spiritual epistemologies. In clinical, ecotherapeutic, and wellness domains, the scale can quantify experiential outcomes of wilderness therapy, green exercise, and mindfulness-in-nature interventions, tracking longitudinal shifts in subjective well-being, psychological restoration, and existential groundedness facilitated by immersive environmental awe.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by this instrument is ecospirituality, conceptualized as a multi-component psychological orientation characterized by viewing the natural world as imbued with spiritual sanctity, interconnectedness, and intrinsic metaphysical value, alongside personal, transcendent emotional encounters within biophysical spaces. Billet et al. (2023) established that ecospirituality operates through two complementary, moderately correlated dimensions: cognitive-belief appraisals and phenomenological-affective experiences.

Dimension 1: Appraisal of Nature’s Spiritual Qualities (Appr)

The Appraisal subscale captures explicit, propositional beliefs, cognitive schemas, and worldview orientations regarding the transcendent essence of nature. It focuses on intellectual and cosmological convictions regarding the natural realm. Rather than measuring a temporary emotional state, appraisal reflects an epistemic lens through which ecological ecosystems are perceived as inherently sacred, interdependent, and ontologically meaningful. Individuals scoring high on this dimension assert that human beings share an intrinsic, metaphysical unity with the environment, that nature serves as a primary source of spiritual sustenance, and that biophysical networks represent more than passive mechanical matter. Representative manifestations include:

• Sacralization of the biosphere: Regarding trees, rivers, landscapes, and wildlife not simply as commodities or biological assets, but as entities imbued with sacred worth.
• Metaphysical interconnectedness: Maintaining an overarching conviction that all living and non-living elements within the cosmos are unified by underlying spiritual bonds.
• Spiritual resource orientation: Conceptualizing the wilderness as an enduring realm for existential renewal, ethical orientation, and metaphysical contemplation.

Dimension 2: Experience of Nature’s Spiritual Qualities (Exp)

The Experience subscale reflects the phenomenological, visceral, and emotional manifestations of spirituality evoked during direct exposure to natural settings. This dimension corresponds with contemporary psychological models of self-transcendent emotions, primarily the emotion of awe, intense wonder, and sublime aesthetic absorption. While an individual may theoretically endorse ecological spirituality as a philosophy, the experiential dimension captures whether natural stimuli evoke acute emotional states characterized by perceived vastness, cognitive accommodation, and boundary dissolution between self and surroundings. Behavioral and affective hallmarks include:

• Profound aesthetic and emotional absorption: Being suddenly overwhelmed or moved to tears by natural vistas, natural forces, or ecological complexities.
• Awe and perceptual vastness: Experiencing the sensation of standing before something incomparably greater than oneself, prompting cognitive humility and the subjective diminution of individual ego concerns.
• Somatic and experiential uniqueness: Endorsing the subjective conviction that the qualitative sensations provoked by natural wilderness environments possess an unmatched, irreplaceable affective signature.

6. Theoretical Framework

The conceptual framework underpinning the Ecospirituality Scale integrates insights from cognitive science of religion, self-transcendent emotion theory, environmental philosophy, and evolutionary psychology. Central to this framework is the theoretical distinction between institutional religion and nature-based spirituality, synthesized with the psychology of sacred values.

The Psychology of Sacred Values and Moralization

Pioneering sociological and psychological models, notably those developed by Émile Durkheim and operationalized in contemporary cognitive science by Philip Tetlock and Scott Atran, highlight that humans segregate the world into the profane (practical, instrumental, market-negotiable) and the sacred (transcendent, inviolable, non-fungible). When an entity is categorized as sacred, cognitive processing shifts from consequentialist cost-benefit calculus to deontological, duty-based imperatives. Billet et al. (2023) hypothesized that ecospirituality represents the psychological sacralization of the biosphere. Unlike standard environmental concern—which often justifies conservation through instrumental anthropocentrism (e.g., safeguarding resource availability for future human generations)—ecospiritual appraisals transform natural preservation into a categorical moral duty. Harming the biosphere shifts from an economic externality to a moral taboo.

Self-Transcendent Emotions and Awe

The affective dimension is theoretically grounded in Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt’s prototypal model of awe. Keltner and Haidt posited that awe arises from encounters with vast stimuli (whether physically expansive mountain ranges or conceptually vast evolutionary systems) that challenge existing mental schemas and necessitate cognitive accommodation. Such encounters diminish the salience of the individual ego (the “small self” effect), elevate feelings of universal kinship, and activate prosocial tendencies. Within environmental psychology, natural scenes represent the most prevalent universal elicitor of awe. The Ecospirituality Scale integrates awe theory by recognizing that repeated experiential encounters with nature’s vastness reinforce the intellectual appraisal of nature as a spiritual domain, establishing a reinforcing cognitive-affective loop.

Biophilia, Deep Ecology, and Moral Expansiveness

The instrument draws intellectual lineage from E. O. Wilson’s Biophilia Hypothesis—the innate human affinity for living systems—and Arne Næss’s philosophical framework of Deep Ecology. Deep Ecology argues that the ecological crisis stems from human anthropocentrism, proposing that ecological healing requires expanding the boundary of the moral self to encompass non-human entities. The scale operationalizes this expansion using Charlie Crimston and colleagues’ framework of moral expansiveness. By appraising the broader natural world as spiritual, individuals expand their “moral circle” outward, according non-human animals, plants, ecosystems, and rivers intrinsic moral standing and moral rights.

7. Validity

The validation program for the Ecospirituality Scale by Billet et al. (2023) utilized eight diverse samples across four countries (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Singapore), spanning undergraduate populations, general online adult panels (e.g., Prolific), and targeted political/interest organizations. Psychometric testing evaluated known-groups validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and incremental predictive validity.

Known-Groups Validity

Known-groups validity was demonstrated by comparing cohorts with established commitments to ecological engagement against control groups:

• Members of dedicated nature clubs (e.g., hiking, mountaineering, birding, and conservation groups) demonstrated significantly higher total scores on the Ecospirituality Scale (M = 5.78 [5.65, 5.91], SD = 0.96) than members of non-nature social, athletic, or professional clubs (M = 5.49 [5.40, 5.58], SD = 1.02).
• This divergence held across both independent subscales: the Appraisal subscale demonstrated a substantial mean difference (M_diff = 0.37, 95% CI [0.17, 0.57]), while the Experience subscale also demonstrated a marked elevation among nature club members (M_diff = 0.21, 95% CI [0.058, 0.36]).
• Similarly, active members of ecological political parties (such as the Green Party) scored markedly higher across both subscales compared to general population political voters.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

The scale was systematically correlated with established psychological metrics across multiple samples to establish construct validity:

• Convergent Validity: The Ecospirituality Scale exhibited robust positive correlations with existing measures of human-nature connection, such as the Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS) and the Nature Relatedness Scale (NR), as well as measures of general dispositional awe and general spirituality. Individuals who view nature as spiritually significant consistently reported higher affinity for natural spaces and elevated spiritual awareness.
• Discriminant Validity: Despite overlapping themes, the scale demonstrated clear divergence from general religious orthodoxy, dogmatism, and theistic worship. Ecospirituality correlated only weakly to moderately with traditional institutional religiosity measures (e.g., frequency of church attendance, belief in anthropomorphic deities), indicating that spiritual nature appraisal operates independently of formal doctrinal religion. Furthermore, ecospirituality was psychometrically distinguishable from generalized political liberalism and socially desirable responding.

Predictive and Incremental Validity

To establish predictive utility, Billet et al. (2023) tested whether ecospirituality accounts for variance in environmental moral decision-making after controlling for established predictors. When entered into simultaneous multiple regression models predicting moral expansiveness for nature (the degree to which nature, plants, and non-human animals are afforded direct moral rights and protections):

• Ecospirituality emerged as a significant unique predictor (β = 0.16, 95% CI [0.11, 0.20]).
• Environmentalist identity remained an independent predictor (β = 0.19, 95% CI [0.14, 0.23]).
• General environmental attitudes also served as a distinct predictor (β = 0.15, 95% CI [0.11, 0.20]).

These findings demonstrate that ecospirituality possesses incremental validity: it captures distinct variance in moral prioritization and ecological ethics beyond standard secular environmental metrics.

8. Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the Ecospirituality Scale across the eight empirical samples demonstrated exceptional internal consistency and longitudinal temporal stability.

Internal Consistency Reliability

Internal consistency was calculated across diverse national, cultural, and demographic groups. The 8-item scale displayed minimal variance in Cronbach’s α across diverse field and laboratory settings:

• The lowest observed Cronbach’s α among the eight independent validation cohorts was .87 (Sample 4).
• The highest observed Cronbach’s α reached .92 (Sample 2).
• Across all eight validation samples, the mean Cronbach’s α was .89.
• Both 4-item subscales showed robust individual reliability, with subscale alpha coefficients routinely exceeding .82 for Appraisal of Nature’s Spiritual Qualities and .84 for Experience of Nature’s Spiritual Qualities.

Test-Retest Temporal Stability

To confirm that the instrument measures a stable psychological orientation rather than transient affective states, temporal stability was evaluated via a longitudinal study across university academic terms. The first wave was administered at the start of the autumn semester in September 2020, and the second wave was administered at the beginning of the winter term in January 2021 (an intervening duration of approximately four months):

• The bivariate test-retest correlation coefficient was r = .77 (95% CI [.74, .79]).
• This stability coefficient confirms that while situational immersion in nature can induce immediate state awe, baseline ecospirituality operates as an enduring, trait-like psychological disposition.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural composition of the Ecospirituality Scale was evaluated using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and multigroup measurement invariance testing.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Item Reduction

Scale construction began with an initial pool of 38 candidate items generated to cover four theoretical themes: spiritual appraisals of the human-nature bond, direct spiritual experiences in nature, general perceived interconnectedness, and anthropomorphic agency attributed to natural phenomena. During initial EFA using oblique rotation (oblimin), parallel analysis and scree plot inspections initially suggested a potential three-factor solution. However, several items exhibited high cross-loadings, redundant semantic phrasing, or weak item-to-total correlations (particularly items addressing the anthropomorphism of natural elements, which loaded inconsistently across distinct demographic cohorts). Systematically pruning redundant and psychometrically unstable items produced an optimized, highly parsimonious 8-item solution governed by two primary latent dimensions.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses on independent cross-validation samples confirmed that an oblique, correlated two-factor structural model provided an excellent fit to the empirical data:

• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .048 (well below the stringent .06 cutoff recommended by Hu & Bentler).
• Root Mean Square Residual (RMSR): .02.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .99 (exceeding the standard .95 benchmark).
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .99.
• Explained Variance: The two-factor structural model accounted for 66% of the total variance in item responses.

Measurement Invariance

To establish whether the scale measures identical constructs across disparate cultural and demographic frameworks, Billet et al. (2023) conducted multigroup confirmatory factor analyses examining configural, metric, and scalar invariance:

• Cross-National Invariance: Evaluated across North American (United States, Canada) and Southeast Asian (Singapore) samples. Following Chen’s (2007) criteria (ΔCFI < .01 and ΔRMSEA < .015), the two-factor model demonstrated complete configural, metric (equal factor loadings), and scalar invariance (equal item intercepts).
• Cross-Religious Invariance: Evaluated across five distinct religious denominations within the multiethnic Singaporean sample (e.g., Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, and religiously unaffiliated/secular individuals). Scalar invariance was fully met across all five groups.
• Practical Implication: Achieving scalar invariance satisfies the prerequisite noted by van de Schoot et al. (2012), validating direct comparisons of latent mean scores across culturally and religiously diverse populations without structural bias.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Original psychometric inventory / self-report psychological questionnaire.
• Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted, or web-based survey administration.
• Total Item Count: 8 items.
• Dimensional Structure: Two distinct, correlated subscales (4 items each):
  • Appraisal of Nature’s Spiritual Qualities (Appr): Items 1, 2, 3, and 4.
  • Experience of Nature’s Spiritual Qualities (Exp): Items 5, 6, 7, and 8.
• Response Format: 7-point Likert rating scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Somewhat disagree
  • 4 = Neither agree nor disagree
  • 5 = Somewhat agree
  • 6 = Agree
  • 7 = Strongly agree
• Administration Instructions: Respondents are presented with the standardized prompt: “Please indicate to what extent you agree with the following statements.”
• Administration Duration: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes to complete.
• Scoring Procedures:
  • No items are reverse-coded. All items are framed positively in the direction of the underlying construct.
  • Appraisal Subscale Score: Calculate the unweighted arithmetic mean of items 1, 2, 3, and 4 (range: 1.00 to 7.00).
  • Experience Subscale Score: Calculate the unweighted arithmetic mean of items 5, 6, 7, and 8 (range: 1.00 to 7.00).
  • Composite Ecospirituality Score: Calculate the overall mean across all 8 items (sum of all items divided by 8; range: 1.00 to 7.00). Higher scores denote stronger ecospiritual appraisal and subjective experiential connection.
• Target Population: Human adults (aged 18 years and older) across general, educational, and clinical contexts.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Test Publication Year: 2023.
• Copyright & Ownership: © 2023 Matthew I. Billet, Adam Baimel, Sakshi S. Sahakari, Mark Schaller, and Ara Norenzayan. Published under commercial publishing arrangements by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of the Journal of Environmental Psychology.
• Licensing and Academic Use: The scale items are published openly within Table 1 of the original empirical research article. The authors have placed the instrument in the public scientific domain for non-commercial educational, clinical, and scholarly research purposes without royalties or licensing fees.
• Commercial Applications: Commercial utilization, inclusion in fee-charging diagnostic platforms, or corporate consultation testing requires formal authorization from the primary corresponding author and copyright holders.
• Original Reference Source: Billet, M. I., Baimel, A., Sahakari, S. S., Schaller, M., & Norenzayan, A. (2023). Ecospirituality: The psychology of moral concern for nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 87, 102001.

12. References

Atran, S., & Axelrod, R. (2008). Reframing sacred values. Negotiation Journal, 24(3), 221–246. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1571-9979.2008.00182.x

Billet, M. I., Baimel, A., Sahakari, S. S., Schaller, M., & Norenzayan, A. (2023). Ecospirituality: The psychology of moral concern for nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 87, 102001. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102001

Chen, F. F. (2007). Sensitivity of goodness of fit indexes to lack of measurement invariance. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 14(3), 464–504. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705510701301834

Crimston, C. R., Bain, P. G., Hornsey, M. J., & Bastian, B. (2016). Moral expansiveness: Examining variability in the extension of the moral world. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(4), 636–653. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000086

Dunlap, R. E., Van Liere, K. D., Mertig, A. G., & Jones, R. E. (2000). Measuring endorsement of the New Ecological Paradigm: A revised NEP scale. Journal of Social Issues, 56(3), 425–442. https://doi.org/10.1111/0022-4537.00176

Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, aesthetic, and spiritual emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930302297

Mayer, F. S., & Frantz, C. M. (2004). The connectedness to nature scale: A measure of individuals’ feeling in community with nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24(4), 503–515. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2004.10.001

Nisbet, E. K., Zelenski, J. M., & Murphy, S. A. (2009). The Nature Relatedness Scale: Linking individuals’ connection with nature to environmental concern and behavior. Environment and Behavior, 41(5), 715–740. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916508318748

Tetlock, P. E. (2003). Thinking the unthinkable: Sacred values and taboo cognitions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(7), 320–324. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00135-9

van de Schoot, R., Lugtig, P., & Hox, J. (2012). A checklist for testing measurement invariance. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9(4), 486–492. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2012.686740

13. Items of the Scale