Affective responses drive the impact neglect in sustainable behavior

Affective Paternalism

“…We therefore argue that a potentially more successful way to increase positive behaviors for self (health) and other (prosocial giving and pro-environmental behavior) may be to apply affective science findings to help people refocus people's efforts from low impact ones to high impact ones (Asutay et al, 2023;Nielsen et al, 2021;). This is similar to effective altruism (Singer, 2009) with the exception that rather than increasing thinking and reasoning so that people redirect their efforts to the most effective cause, our novel proposal is that affect, in a similar way, can be redirected to encourage pro-self, prosocial, and pro-environmental actions.…”