The human race as a collective group is not acting in its own long-term interest. With each year that passes, we are getting further away from many of the sustainability goals, putting the survival of the species at risk and, contrary to our fundamental programming, reducing the viability of our descendants from continuing out lineage.
Through the prism of behavioural psychology, this article looks at the instantaneous causes of behaviour (reflex), learned behaviour, and potential interventions that will eliminate unsustainable behaviour at the individual and species level.
Involuntary Behaviour (Descartes)
Behaviour that guarantees the future of the natural environment is evidently too complex a trait to emerge as what Rene Descartes describes as “involuntary” in humans. Such behaviours are useful for protecting us in the very short term (e.g. the knee jerk, or moving one’s fingers from a flame) but bypassing the rational mind, as they do, they cannot emerge as a result of knowledge of long-term priorities.
With no apparent natural instinct for global sustainability, the ambition of achieving such a state is reliant on external stimuli to promote and reward sustainable behaviour of individuals. So what is the hope for natural conditioning?
Learned Behaviour Through Natural Conditioning
The law of effect proposes that: “We do something in the present because when we did it in the past, it was followed by a reward. The causes of our voluntary behaviour are not to be found in some future, anticipated event, but in past, actually experienced events.” – Schwartz (1984, page 140).
Slightly more complex than our “involuntary” behaviour, would be those most strongly conditioned in us through experience of our environment and associations between such behaviour and positive and negative outcomes. The strength of the conditioning is correlated with temporal contiguity (closeness in time) of the behaviour and outcome, and the frequency of the association. While it may not necessarily be accurate to draw a scale of “voluntariness” of different behaviours – Thomas Hobbes considered all behaviour to be involuntary – strongly conditioned behaviour through contiguity and repetition are less readily overridden by competing stimuli and associations, so as to appear less voluntary.
Historically there has been no short-term or medium-term feedback on individual consumption behaviour that would change behaviour in any significant way (except possibly to encourage it). Even individuals who are aware of the environmental effects of over-consumption are not experiencing those effects immediately, as a direct consequence of their actions and are not always willing to reduce such behaviour even with that knowledge (Paiva et al., 2022).
Without temporal contiguity, a key element for associationism (Schwartz, 1984), unsustainable consumption behaviour is less readily associated with its negative consequences to create what in psychology is called an “operant behaviour-outcome pair” (Azzi et al, 1964). In the same way that the negative health consequences of smoking are not easily associated with the action of smoking, unsustainable consumption behaviour does not instinctually evoke environmental damage. Increasing the association between the action and consequence, as in the case of smoking and ill-health, has been shown to have an inhibiting effect on individuals and may be a key to our sustainability problem.
At best an individual may have no cognition of the consequences of unsustainable behaviour in which case reinforcements and punishments could theoretically be effective (Schwartz, 1984). At worst, individuals may develop “learned helplessness” as a response to their perceived inability to control the consequences of which they are cognisant (Schwartz, 1984). Where individuals are not cognisant of their actions’ consequences, conditioned reinforcers can be used to control behaviour. Conditioned reinforcers used to promote sustainability include carpool lanes and subsidies for buying an electric car etc. The drawback to Conditioned reinforcers is that the behaviour will only continue while the reinforcer is in effect.
For these reasons, sustainable behaviour must be taught purposefully and reinforced with social norms, culture, laws, incentives and education to develop a widely held ethic if society is going to continue as we recognise it. While some remain optimistic that an environmentally concerned ethic will be adopted by humanity as a result of our natural social progression, the rights of the environment are at present a peripheral concern.
Natural Selection (Darwinism)
By their definition, unsustainable behaviours cannot and will not continue for ever. They are unsustainable. The ultimate mechanism for the cessation of such behaviour (or extinction as it can be ominously termed in the literature) when the others discussed in this article have failed is natural selection.
The trait of sustainable behaviour is clearly not innate in us. Not only has the timescale been too short for random genetic mutations to offer solutions to such an anthropologically recent challenge as that of gaining the means of compromising one’s own environment, but there is no apparent mechanism in nature by which it could be selected if it were present. The negative consequences of the less desirable trait, unsustainable behaviour, has no greater effect on the individual example of the species which exhibits it than it does on the whole population.
If the laws of natural selection have produced a dominant mammal a species which does not exhibit sustainable behaviour, and has no ability to learn it, the tree of life will be pared back – but by how much? The natural mechanism which deselects unsustainable behaviour could be the extinction of the human race, along with many other species, without prior intervention. Was it the destined fate of modern humans to innovate and prosper beyond our means, or of all hominids, higher primates, mammals or even further back?
If we cannot innovate our way out the dead-end we have embarked upon (still an open question) are there conceivable mechanisms of selection within the species to birth a sustainable population? Lessons from evolutionary psychology would say that there are. Status and social ostracism have been able to select out unfavourable characteristics from the gene pool and there appears to be a burgeoning demand for environmental consciousness in individuals. Without the need for restrictive laws it is possible that those genetically predisposed to short-term, localised, in-tribe favouritism gradually lose social status, reducing their reproductive prospects.