Intro - doughnut economics
Kate Raworth wrote the book ‘doughnut economics’ already 2 years ago. The book has been one of the best selling economist book in recent history.
Kate brings together a lot of information and opposes her views on the prevalent economic models that are still explained in business schools and that in her opinion create havoc and are too narrowly defined.
Human activity, she states, has only a limited band-with of possibilities, as it bounces fast on the external boundary that are the limits of our planet and biosphere; the internal limit is about the social justice and the human dignity that has to be raised at a minimal level.
Kate brings different disciplines together : systemic views, sociology,… She also dives into psychology, and that’s the field of my blog of today. Because it seems that we humans have been programmed in our evolution in a certain way to make quick decisions related to fight or fight for example in survival. A lot of these archaic and automatic behaviors turn out to have some irrational and unforeseen behaviors in daily life.
It is called cognitive bias. It is good to understand these biases, as they will in the fate of climate change have unintended consequences of delay for example.
What are the cognitive biases?
The term of psychology indicates that human intuition will distort reality to an important extent. We make decision shortcuts and the consequence can be systematic errors source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias)
Why is this important in climate change
Climate change is happening. We also know that it’s the result of increased carbon emissions from human activities like land degradation and the burning of fossil fuels. And we know that it’s urgent.
However we seem not to start acting on it, but for what reason?
Psychologists have identified more than 150 cognitive biases we all share. Of these, a few are particularly important in explaining why we lack the will to act on climate change. (source : arithmeticofcompassion)
Hyperbolic discounting. We perceive that the present is more important than the future. In ancient times it was more important to look at what would kill us directly, Now we are unable to address more distant and slower challenges.
Our lack of concern for future generations. Evolutionary theory suggests that we care most about just a few generations of family members: our great-grandparents to great-grandchildren. While we may understand what needs to be done to address climate change, it’s hard for us to see how the sacrifices required for generations existing beyond this short time span are worth it.
The bystander effect. We tend to believe that someone else will deal with a crisis. This developed for good reason: if a threatening wild animal is lurking at the edge of our hunter-gatherer group, it’s a waste of effort for every single member to spring into action — not to mention could put more people into danger. In smaller groups, it was usually pretty clearly delineated who would step up for which threats, so this worked. Today, however, this leads us to assume (often wrongly) that our leaders must be doing something about the crisis of climate change. And the larger the group, the stronger this bias becomes.
The sunk-cost fallacy also called commitment heuristic We are biased towards staying the course even in the face of negative outcomes. The more we’ve invested time, energy or resources into that course, the more likely we are to stick with it – even if it no longer seems optimal. This helps explain, for example, our continued reliance on fossil fuels as a primary source of energy in the face of decades of evidence that we both can and should transition to clean energy and a carbon neutral future.
Pseudo inefficacy: people are not willing to take action if the challenge is so large that their efforts seem like “a drop in the bucket.”
Planning fallacy: not taking into account evident elements like drought in a planning process
Optimism bias we often think overly optimistic and think, ‘It’ll never happen to me.’ At the same time Humans are more likely to change behaviour when challenges are framed positively, instead of negatively.
Single Action Bias : individuals take only one action to respond to a threat, even when it provides only incremental risk reduction and may not be the most effective option. example plant trees
(more detailed scenarios to be found at http://www.braced.org/contentAsset/raw-data/533c48ab-749c-49e9-971b-3d0a83293256/attachmentFile))
These insights involve the finite nature of human attention and cognitive resources, the complex interactions of personal experience and emotion, the challenges that uncertainty and risk place on behavior, and the profoundly social nature of human action
The scenarios that happen with competitive biases and climate change
So these cognitive biases are creating a freeze mode (do nothing) or a fly mode (the other have to do it) and not a ’fight mode (take action on a local level).
So how can we start taking action on a local level?
The message is often to ‘listen to science’. Probably I would say listen to the DATA. We should not become catastrophists (this causes also inaction), but make sure that the DATA of a not so distant future is well explained and well documented . This DATA can be our global and here and now view in order to start making the needed steps for action at a local level.
Conclusion
Instead of writing think globally, act locally we should change it to think DATAlly . as well, meaning that it would be good to start from global data and statistics and then to work on an individual case.
We should never, ever stop caring, never give up because it is always possible to make a difference.
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