Aware but Inactive: Environmental Knowledge, Affect, and the Value-Action Gap Among Young Adults in Urban India

Environmental awareness among young adults has never been more widespread — yet consistent pro-environmental behaviour remains stubbornly rare. This study investigates the disconnect between what people know, what they feel, and what they actually do, using waste segregation as a precise, everyday behavioural measure. Drawing on survey data from 118 young adults in India aged 18 to 25, we examine four constructs — environmental cognition, affect, digital influence, and behaviour — and find a striking divergence: mean scores for knowledge and emotional engagement were 4.21 and 4.08 out of 5 respectively, while behavioural scores averaged just 2.82. Most tellingly, 94.1% of participants could correctly distinguish between wet and dry waste, yet only 11% reported always segregating it. Neither cognition nor affect correlated positively with behaviour, suggesting that knowing more and feeling more does not, in itself, produce doing more. Through quantitative analysis and thematic examination of open-ended responses, this study identifies three compounding barriers to action: infrastructural inadequacy, the friction of inconvenience, and psychological distance — the tendency to experience environmental consequences as too remote to demand immediate response. The findings challenge the assumption that awareness is a reliable pathway to action and suggest that the value-action gap is as much a design and systems problem as a psychological one.