Using Freuds Ideas
To approach our difficulty from an analytic framework, we have to talk about the psychotherapy Freud developed, called psychoanalysis. From this perspective, because behavior is controlled by deeply unconscious forces and maintained by an active defense structure, we must learn to experience unconscious feelings in order for anything to heal. Consequently, Freud believed that emotional material must be allowed to surface and be expressed. This expression he called catharsis, a term he borrowed...
Key Concepts
Behavioral engineering antecedent and consequence strategies Community-based social marketing Conditioned stimulus, response unconditioned stimulus, response Conditioning classical (Pavlovian), operant (Skinnerian) Contingency management (consequence strategies) Contingency trap, social trap (reinforcement dilemmas) Discrimination, discriminative stimuli Information, modeling, prompts Positive, negative punishment, punishers Positive, negative reinforcement, reinforcers Rational economic model...
What on Earth Are We Doing
The environmental crisis is an outward manifestation of a crisis of mind and spirit. There could be no greater misconception of its meaning than to believe it is concerned only with endangered wildlife, human-made ugliness, and pollution. These are part of it, but more importantly, the crisis is concerned with the kind of creatures we are and what we must become in order to survive. (Lynton K. Caldwell, quoted by G. T. Miller, 2002, p. 11 F f hat will your future be like If you are like most...
Visualize an Ecologically Healthy World
Any serious look at environmental problems presents a troubling future. No matter how it is accomplished, sustaining human life on the planet will require huge changes in the way societies are organized and conducted, changes that may or may not be pleasurable. For example, whether or not we design sustainable technologies, we will end our dependence on fossil fuels soon because the global supply is quickly running out. There simply is not enough oil on the planet to forever run the number of...
Gender and Environmentalism
Whether or not environmentalism is best conceptualized as altruism, a large body of empirical work now exists demonstrating that women have more environmental concern and undertake more environmentally responsible actions than men (Zelezny, Chua, & Aldrich, 2000). This difference holds up across cultures and age groups. Females show more environmental concern on the NEP scale (described earlier), more concern about the consequences of environmental problems on personal well-being, the...
Stress Associated Behavioral Disorders
Behavioral disorders such as overeating, smoking, and alcoholism are reaching epidemic proportions, and often are associated with feelings of stress. For example, stress can stimulate eating disorders (Arnow, Kenardy, & Agras, 1992), and many of us are aware that nutrition and healthy eating generally suffer when we are under stress. Such patterns are likely contributing to the epidemic of obesity in the United States and other developed countries. According to the U.S. Department of Health...
Key Concepts On Global Warming
Artificial intelligence Associative networks Bounded rationality Confirmation bias Framing effects Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO wrong, limited, irrelevant information) Heuristics (affect, availability, representativeness) Indicator species Information processing models Neural networks Mental maps Mismatch hypothesis Pre-existing biases Proximal cognition Quantitative illiteracy Rational economic model Regression toward the mean Risk assessment Selective attention Sensory adaptation Subjective...
Risk Assessment Whose Quantification Problem Is It
We learned in the previous chapter that many environmental conditions threaten human health and well-being. How do we objectively evaluate the risks of such conditions Who is responsible for determining risk to the general public An important area where cognitive psychology has been applied to environmental problems is called risk assessment. In risk assessment, human health hazards associated with various substances and activities are evaluated and quantified. This section will summarize the...
Operant Conditioning
Although classical conditioning is relevant to current ecological issues, many Skinnerian analyses of operant principles have been applied directly (e.g., Nevin, 1985 Skinner, 1985, 1991). In fact, Skinner was one of the first psychologists to repeatedly relate the issues of resource depletion, pollution, and overpopulation to human survival. His best-selling novel Walden Two (1948) explored the question of utopia from a behavioral perspective, and is a thoughtful and provocative look at how...
Emotional Dimensions
The passion that human beings feel toward wildlife has been noted even in an environmental law textbook. Introducing a discussion of the Endangered Species Act, Rodgers (1994) noted that our relationship to wildlife taps the deepest wellsprings of human emotion and behavior. . It is a source of inspiration and art, recorded from the Paleolithic cave works to the contemporary cartoons of Gary Larson. It is the font and fodder of religion, as no one would doubt who has seen images of the spotted...
Practice Conscious Consumption
Voluntary simplicity implies the obvious principle of conscious consumption, for example, not only reducing how much we buy and consume, but choosing environmentally friendly products whenever we need to make purchases. Research shows that people who hold values in line with the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) (discussed in chap. 3) practice ecologically conscious consumer behavior (Roberts & Bacon, 1997). Specifically, those who agree that the balance of nature is very delicate and easily...
Behavioral Self Control
More congruent with a behavioral viewpoint than manipulating economic regulations or group identity is to focus on behavioral engineering that takes place at the individual, rather than the governmental, level. How can we as individuals use behavioral principles to change our behavior Individual behavioral engineering can be implemented in three ways (a) modeling appropriate behaviors so that others can copy them, as in the shower study described earlier (b) intentionally reinforcing another...
Global Warming Key Concepts
Cognitive dissonance Dominant social paradigm Ecofeminism Environmental justice Factors influencing environmental concern age, education, gender, political affiliation, social class, urban vs. rural residence Foot-in-the-door technique Fundamental attribution error Gender differences in environmental concern Green consumerism Justice (distributive, environmental, procedural, scope of) Self-serving bias Social diffusion Voluntary simplicity Most thoughtful people agree that the world is in...
The Ecological Self The Self Beyond the Self
To experience our place in the world gives us an expanded sense of who we are. The holistic approach to environmental problems suggests that ordinary perception of ourselves as isolated beings encapsulated in separate skins is misleading and dangerous. To successfully address environmental problems requires that we also recognize our ecological selves, a term first coined by Arne Naess 1985 . Naess argued, as have many after him Cohen, 1993 Conn, 1991 Hillman amp Ventura, 1992 Keepin, 1992...
Green Consumerism
In line with past research Mainieri, Barnett, Valdero, Unipan, amp Oskamp, 1997 , we define buying green as purchasing and consuming products that are benign toward the environment e.g., products with postconsumer recycled materials, with minimal or reusable packaging, and made from biodegradable ingredients . As one would expect, people who have stronger pro-environmental beliefs about the importance of buying green are more likely to buy products boasting environmental claims. Once again,...
Attribution Theory Making Up Meaning
Worldviews are a coherent picture of reality, and one example of our attempt to figure out the world. Other attempts at making meaning give rise to explanations for other people's behaviors. Social psychologists call the act of creating explanations for behavior the attribution process. We rarely see the social world strictly in terms of overt behaviors. Instead, we are continuously attributing those behaviors to our constructed explanations. He smiles when he is hiking in the wilderness...
Environmental Toxins as Stressors
Toxic chemicals and their fumes are physical stressors, as they can directly cause symptoms such as hyperventilation, nausea and vomiting, and in severe poisoning cases, convulsions, unconsciousness, and death Nadakavukaren, 2000 Weiss, 1997 . Toxins Eire also considered environmental stressors, because they are present in environments where we live and work. Pollution, industrial chemicals, and consumer products are forms of environmental stressors. In fact, the medical profession adopted the...
The Role of Emotions in Our Judgment of Risk
Emotion, also known as affect, can contribute to the judgment of risk, primarily as it influences the availability of certain memories. We are more likely to recall emotionally charged events than more mundane ones. When a hazard evokes feelings of dread e.g., cancer , it will be perceived as posing a greater risk than less dreaded events, such as traffic accidents Slovic, Finucane, Peters, amp MacGregor, 2002 . Slovic and colleagues referred to this process as the affect heuristic, where...
Overconsumption
Embracing an ethic of care could help us critically address overcon-sumption, a pivotal source point for most other dangerous planetary problems. In the West, consumer culture is facilitated in part by applied social psychologists who go to work in the advertising industry, designing messages to persuade their audiences to buy products they otherwise would not purchase. As the chairman of President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers once said, the American economy's ultimate purpose is...
The Basis and Basics of Freuds Theory
Because Freud's writing filled 24 volumes produced over a 50-year career Strachey amp Freud, 1964 , his work is impossible to thoroughly describe in one chapter. Nonetheless, there are three main principles to Freud's thought that underlie the many particular concepts and case studies comprising the bulk of his writing. If you grasp these three principles, you will have a good foundation from which to apply Freudian thought to ecological issues 1. Much of our behavior is a result of unconscious...
Who Cares About the Environment
It's worth noting that interest in environmental problems is not randomly distributed across the population. Demographic variables show predictable association with environmental concern. A few decades ago, environmental sociologists Van Liere and Dunlap 1980 showed that environmental concern is more prevalent among people with more education and in higher social classes. There are at least two possible explanations for a relation between class and attitude a Education could enhance...
Applying Gestalt Psychology
Why don't we see our embedded relationship with fellow human beings and the ecosystem more consistently One answer comes from Gestalt therapy, a form of group and individual psychotherapy that became popular in the 1970s and is still widely practiced in the United States and Britain today. Gestalt therapy was founded by Frederick Fritz Perls 1893-1970 Perls, 1969, 1971, 1978 , who was trained as a psychiatrist, and worked as a clinician. We can understand Perls' work as a synthesis of Gestalt...
Psychological Reactions Boomsters Versus Doomsters
Most people are familiar with the outlines to these problems, but reactions to confronting them are a psychological issue that is rarely addressed. As you read the previous material, did you feel some inkling of fear or despair Did you scan the material, thinking to yourself that you already knew it Did you find yourself growing irritated or frustrated Were you feeling overwhelmed Or did you wonder what any of this has to do with you These reactions are important because they mediate how we...
