Transcriber: Alexey S. Reviewer: Zsófia Herczeg
All over the world, people and organizations
are faced with growing threats to the environment and human health.
Deforestation, hazardous waste, climate change,
contaminated air and water,
and many other issues pose unique threats to us,
our communities and in turn, the global environment.
Over the past several decades,
individuals and communities have organized to address those threats,
and there have been some important victories.
Unfortunately, there have been far too many defeats,
and we know that environmental victories are temporary,
while losses are often permanent.
I’m going to argue
that the success of the actions of individuals and communities
in fighting these unwanted environmental threats
has been limited
in part by activists’ and organizations’ failure to understand
and incorporate important aspects of human behavior
into their approach to solutions to the problem.
For example, in 2019, activists in the United States,
here in the Chicago area, were faced with a proposal for construction
of a billion-dollar fossil fuel power plant.
The plant would add enormous amounts of toxic air pollution to the region
and billions of pounds of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere every year.
Unlike so many environmental conflicts,
activists and community organizations were ultimately successful
in stopping this unnecessary, unhealthy and unwanted project.
So what was the key to success for these groups?
Well, organizers understood that no single piece of information
was going to be sufficient to stop this project.
In other words, there’s no magic bullet
which will stop an environmentally damaging project or event.
It takes a combination of approaches to be successful.
Organizers also understood that winning conflicts, such as this,
required working with people from diverse backgrounds
with different self-interests.
To be successful,
this required an understanding of the underlying human behaviors
that people use or have evolved to make decisions.
Humans, like other living organisms,
have evolved over times in ways that are adaptive to their environment,
and this includes how decisions are made.
However, as the environment changes,
some of those previous adaptations may become mechanisms
that impede rational decision-making and survival.
So while human behavior is a huge field of study,
I’m going to focus on a key aspect of human behavior - discounting -
and how it can impede rational decision-making
in environmental conflicts.
So what is discounting?
Well, people have evolved in certain ways.
One of this: to pay less attention to events with certain characteristics.
What are those characteristics?
Well, we pay less attention to events that occur away from us in time -
temporal discounting.
What happens in the future or what happened in the past
is less important to me than what happens right now.
We pay less attention to events that occur away from us in space as well.
That's spatial discounting.
What happens here is more important to me than what happens there.
We pay also less attention to events that affect non-human species -
species discounting, and this is a type of hierarchy.
So we pay the most attention to organisms that are like primates.
And then we have less and less concern as we move down a taxonomic ladder
to mice and rats, to insects, to nematodes.
That is species discounting.
We also evolved to pay less attention to events
that affect other humans, not related to us.
That’s genetic discounting, and it’s also a hierarchy.
It has to do with the degree of relatedness
and the perceived degree of relatedness.
So what happens to my kids
is more important to me than what happens to your kids -
everything else equal.
We pay less attention to events
that we also don’t see, smell, taste, touch or hear;
ones that we don’t immediately sense with our senses,
or events that we pay less attention to.
Radiation - unseen, no smell,
very damaging - is a useful example of this.
So the result of these general patterns of human decision-making -
temporal discounting, spatial discounting, species discounting,
genetic discounting and sensory discounting -
is it that creates something I term a perception gap.
The gap is what per se is between what is perceived
and what is actually real for people.
Bridging that perception gap in our activities
to stop unwanted environmental impacts is key to reaching people
and effectively getting behavioral change and support.
So why does it matter in environmental issues?
Well, it happens to be that the negative effects
of environmental issues, of ecological issues
are distributed in ways that allow humans to discount them
even when they have the potential for serious harm
and/or permanent ecological damage.
Let’s use pesticides as an example.
Pesticides - chemicals designed to kill pests -
are used and have been used for hundreds of years.
And while beneficial in many instances,
pesticide use has caused enormous amounts of serious negative impacts to health,
environment and sustainability.
So let’s use those pesticides as an example.
Pesticides cause a range of serious and deadly effects,
but those impacts, such as cancer, may not occur for years -
temporal discounting.
Pesticides can move in the environment
from where the farmer applies them off-site through air, water and wildlife.
And adverse effects can occur far away from the point of application -
spatial discounting.
Pesticides also affect many other species than humans.
Bees, for example, have been wiped out globally
by a new class of synthetic pesticides.
That would be species discounting.
Pesticides affect other people not related to the applicator.
My family doesn’t get affected,
but your family might pay less attention to that.
And the fact that pesticide residues
are not perceivable in the environment necessarily.
We don’t detect them in the air, water or food
without specialized analytical equipment.
So what we don’t see,
even if it’s a residue on an apple that we’re eating,
can be extremely problematic, and that’s sensory discounting.
So the five categories of human discounting
mesh with how environmental impacts are spread
in ways that create impediments to human concern
and eventual human action to solve those problems.
So what does it mean for increasing the success
of conservation and environmental protection efforts?
Well, it suggests that when we evaluate an environmental threat,
whatever it may be,
the most effective approach
to inducing behavior change and generating support
are ones that explicitly recognize and incorporate
an understanding of human discounting into their approach.
In the case of the power plant,
activists tailored messages to constituencies.
For example: churches, governmental bodies,
organizations, individuals, schools.
You get the idea.
They tailored those messages to address the discounting
and bring back effects to the individuals to motivate behavioral change.
In other words, we want to narrow the gap in perception.
So I suggest organizations have an explicit recognition
of human discounting and human behavior,
and organize and plan their efforts to bridge those perception gaps,
which occur all at once or one at a time
in most environmental issues.
Thank you.