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to act. The second set of processes is more
evolutionary in nature, and relates to our need to
make quick, automatic, often emotion-based
responses to situations (Damasio, 1995). Life is
full of situations that require quick, automatic
decision-making (whether it be when you are
playing sport, trying to cross the road or being
confronted by an aggressive person). As part of our
evolutionary progression we have, of course,
developed valuable decision-making structures
that enable us to essentially act without thinking
in such situations. The crucial insight here is to
realize that not all irrational forms of decision-
making are necessarily bad (Damasio, 1995;
Gladwell, 2005). When used in situations where
little time is available to make a judgement to act,
following an instinct is an important part of
human decision-making. As Malcolm Gladwell
(2005) points out in his influential book
Blink:
The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
, the
crucial thing is to recognize when it is best to use
our rational and irrational capacities to guide our
behaviour.
When it comes to changing human behaviours
towards the environment, simply recognizing
that humans often behave in more-than-rational
ways does not necessarily help those designing
environmental policies. Indeed, for a long time one
of the reasons that policy-makers chose to ignore
the irrational dimensions of human decision-
making was not because they did not realize
that they were an important driver of human
behaviour, but because they seemed mysterious
and unexplainable (Becker, 1962). Recent research
has, however, suggested that there are distinct
patterns in the irrational nature of human
behaviour (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). The idea
that humans are
predictably irrational
has provided
an opportunity for policy-makers to begin to
design environmental strategies that take into
account the irrational aspects of human conduct
(Ariely, 2008). These developments have been
particularly important in the fields of environ-
mental policy, where there is clear evidence that
humans consistently act irrationally, with little
concern for the impacts that their short-term
actions have on the long-term sustainability of the
environmental systems upon which they depend.
When it comes to addressing more-than-
rational human behaviours towards the environ-
ment, there is one further development that we
need to be aware of. In addition to psychologically
inspired developments in economic research
(which have demonstrated the significant role
of automatic and emotional forms of decision-
making), emerging research in behavioural psy-
chology has revealed the ways in which irrational
prompts to human action can be used by
policy-makers to actually change behaviours. Of
course, this insight is nothing new. Corporations
have for a long time been exploiting the often-
subconscious aspects of our decision-making
process to influence our consumption patterns
(Packard, 1957; Twitchell, 1996; Frank, 1997;
Cialdini, 2007). Whether it is through the use of
adverts and commercials, or the clever design of
supermarkets, corporations have become experts
at exploiting the more-than-rational aspects of
human decision-making in order to encourage
us to consume their products in ever-greater
quantities. The rise of commercial wants (as
opposed to needs) depends not so much on
rational decisions, but on the emotional suggestion
that buying certain products will somehow make
us feel better about ourselves (see
discussion early
in this chapter).
Increasingly, those concerned with environ-
mental behaviour have recognized that it may be
possible to utilize the insights of behavioural
psychology to prompt human action away from
mass consumption and towards more sustain-
able patterns of behaviour. Such strategies have
the advantage that, unlike legal restrictions, or
even market incentives, they are non-coercive:
they do not seek to force people to act in more
environmentally friendly ways, but merely to
make it easier to act in such ways. Underlying
such initiatives is the assumption that one of the
reasons that people consistently behave in ways
that harm the environment is because the world
