Why People Harm the Environment Although They Try to Treat It Well: An Evolutionary-Cognitive Perspective on Climate Compensation

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate changes stress the importance of understanding why people harm the environment despite their attempts to behave in climate friendly ways. This paper argues that one reason behind why people do this is that people apply heuristics, originally shaped to handle social exchange, on the issues of environmental impact. Reciprocity and balance in social relations have been fundamental to social cooperation, and thus to survival, and therefore the human brain has become specialized by natural selection to compute and seek this balance. When the same reasoning is applied to environment-related behaviors, people tend to think in terms of a balance between “environmentally friendly” and “harmful” behaviors, and to morally account for the average of these components rather than the sum. This balancing heuristic leads to compensatory green beliefs and negative footprint illusions—the misconceptions that “green” choices can compensate for unsustainable ones. “Eco-guilt” from imbalance in the moral environmental account may promote pro-environmental acts, but also acts that are seemingly pro-environmental but in reality more harmful than doing nothing at all. Strategies for handling problems caused by this cognitive insufficiency are discussed.

Assuming the Best: Individual Differences in Compensatory “Green” Beliefs Predict Susceptibility to the Negative Footprint Illusion

“…Previous research on the NFI has proposed an averaging bias as the mechanism underpinning the illusion (e.g., [9]), possibly as a result of people misapplying the previously mentioned social balancing heuristic proposed by Sörqvist and Langeborg [11]. The "averaging account" is also supported by research indicating that the NFI is not dependent on the number of "green" items (e.g., [21]), which it would be if any type of additive calculation was being made.…”

Motivation Analysis of Online Green Users: Evidence From Chinese “Ant Forest”

“…The results showed that social motivation and environmental awareness jointly influenced online immersion and further determined the global cooperation intention. Sorqvist and Langeborg, 2019). These misconceptions may result from the large psychological distance between humans and climate change, resulting in a lower intention to participate in environmental protection activities (Brugger et al, 2016;Jones et al, 2017;Ejelov et al, 2018).…”

“…Experiments have demonstrated many factors that affect the public engagement of climate change, such as cognitive bias (Lazarus, 2008;Holmgren et al, 2018), lack of knowledge (Sterman and Sweeney, 2007), negative footprint illusion (Holmgren et al, 2019), and even the experience of extreme weather (Bergquist et al, 2019;Marshall et al, 2019), leading to public disregard for this problem (Mazar and Zhong, 2010;Sorqvist and Langeborg, 2019), which is the so-called "psychological distance of climate change" (McDonald et al, 2015). Recent literature shows a negative relation between psychological distance of climate change and pro-environmental behavioral intentions (Sacchi et al, 2016).…”

Wicked Problems of Smart Cities

“…Energy rebounding and negative spillover can be explained by the mental heuristic that people apply to seek a balance between 'good' and 'bad' behavior [22,23]. This balancing heuristic has its evolutionary roots in governing social exchange (give and take in relationships) and works well for that purpose, but when the same balancing heuristic is applied to environmental issues (to balance 'environmentally friendly' and 'harmful' behavior) it leads to systematically erroneous thinking and potentially harmful behavior [22]. For example, people tend to think that small emission cuts can compensate for past emission rates and, thus, reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) altogether, while, in reality, CO 2 concentration keeps on accumulating [24].…”