Inspired by the principles used to market physical products, campaigns to promote pro-environmental behaviour have increasingly emphasized self-interested (for example, economic) reasons for engaging with a self-transcendent cause (that is, protecting the environment) 1,2 . Yet, psychological evidence about values and behaviour suggests that giving self-interested reasons, rather than self-transcending reasons, to carry out a self-transcending action should be ineffective at increasing self-transcending behaviour more generally 3,4 . In other words, such a campaign may fail to cause spillover, or an increase in other, different environmental behaviours 5 . Here we show that recycling rates are dependent on the information participants receive about a separate environmental behaviour, car-sharing (carpooling in the USA). In two experiments, we found that recycling was significantly higher than control when participants received environmental information about car-sharing, but was no different from control when they received financial information or (in experiment 2) received both financial and environmental information. Our results suggest that, congruent with value theory, positive spillover from one environmental message to another behaviour (car-sharing to recycling) may occur primarily when self-transcending reasons alone are made salient.When attempting to persuade people to adopt proenvironmental behaviour, it seems intuitive to persuade them that it is in their own interest. Indeed, many campaigns emphasize financial reasons to change environmental behaviour. For example, the website for the UK's Act on CO 2 campaign points to money-saving features of energy-reducing behaviours and appliances 1 . Similarly, the USA's Environmental Protection Agency often mentions the financial savings associated with the actions it recommends 2 . However, campaigners have recently raised the possibility that this tactic may reduce the scope for positive spillover in pro-environmental behaviours 5 . Spillover refers to the likelihood that the encouragement of one environmental behaviour (for example, through a campaign), or its performance, will lead to the performance of other pro-environmental behaviours in the future. Thøgersen and Crompton argued that financial incentives might actually decrease the likelihood of positive spillover; that is, such incentives may make people less likely to carry out environmental actions in general 5 .The theoretical basis for this concern comes from extant psychological models of values and goals 3,4 -in particular, Schwartz's model of social values 4 . In this model, values that promote selfinterest or self-enhancement (for example, power, wealth) tend to conflict with values that transcend personal interest to consider the welfare of the community (for example, helpfulness, protecting the environment), whereas values that follow intellectual and emotional interests in uncertain directions (for example, creativity, freedom) tend to conflict with values that emphasize protecting
Classical informal reasoning "fallacies," for example, begging the question or arguing from ignorance, while ubiquitous in everyday argumentation, have been subject to little systematic investigation in cognitive psychology. In this article it is argued that these "fallacies" provide a rich taxonomy of argument forms that can be differentially strong, dependent on their content. A Bayesian theory of content-dependent argument strength is presented. Possible psychological mechanisms are identified. Experiments are presented investigating whether people's judgments of the strength of 3 fallacies--the argumentum ad ignorantiam, the circular argument or petitio principii, and the slippery slope argument--are affected by the factors a Bayesian account predicts. This research suggests that Bayesian accounts of reasoning can be extended to the more general human activity of argumentation.
A long tradition of psychological research has lamented the systematic errors and biases in people's perception of the characteristics of sequences generated by a random mechanism such as a coin toss. It is proposed that once the likely nature of people's actual experience of such processes is taken into account, these "errors" and "biases" actually emerge as apt reflections of the probabilistic characteristics of sequences of random events. Specifically, seeming biases reflect the subjective experience of a finite data stream for an agent with a limited short-term memory capacity. Consequently, these biases seem testimony not to the limitations of people's intuitive statistics but rather to the extent to which the human cognitive system is finely attuned to the statistics of the environment.
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