Human Nature and Environmentally Responsible Behavior

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Stephen Kaplan

Stephen Kaplan [*]

This article constitutes a search for a people-oriented approach to encouraging environmentally responsible behavior. It attempts to provide a source of motivations, reduce the corrosive sense of helplessness, and generate solutions to environmental problems that do not undermine the quality of life of the people who are affected. The altruism-centered approach currently popular in the academic literature, by contrast, is seen as contributing to helplessness and focusing on sacrifice rather than quality-of-life-enhancing solutions. An alternative, the Reasonable Person Model, offers an evolutionary/cognitive/motivational approach to understanding human nature.

Facilitating the adoption of environmentally responsible behavior (ERB) is a major challenge for the behavioral sciences. As with any problem, how one approaches it and whether or not it can be solved depend to a large degree on how the problem is conceptualized (Bardwell, 1989; Posner, 1973). In the research literature a prominent approach to this difficult issue has cast the problem as essentially motivational, focusing on altruism as a crucial motive to study (De Young, this issue). The altruism-centered approach is seen as having several inadvertent consequences, including contributing to helplessness and stressing sacrifice rather than quality-of-life-enhancing solutions.

The purpose of this article is to propose an alternative approach that avoids some of the limitations inherent in the altruism-centered approach. This alternative approach has three goals: to provide a durable source of motivation, to reduce the corrosive sense of helplessness, and to generate innovative solutions that people do not perceive as threatening their quality of life. Achieving these goals requires more than ad hoc proposals or patchwork solutions. Rather, the approach must be based on a coherent conception of human nature that speaks to the relationship between how people approach new information, how information relates to motivation, and how information and motivation relate to behavior change. Although such a conception may well be beyond what is currently possible, the Reasonable Person Model is proposed as a first approximation to such a conception of human nature. Before describing this framework and proposing the alternative approach, I begin by explaining my reservations about altruism an d explore some hypotheses concerning why altruism is so popular and why this popularity may be ill-placed.

Altruism in Perspective

Although efforts to encourage ERB have called upon a wide range of motivations, a substantial portion of the scholarly literature on this topic has focused on altruism. Informal observation suggests that the tendency to focus on altruism is also characteristic among students concerned about environmental problems. In their view there is an inherent linkage between "good" motives and "good" behavior. In addition to the implicit moral issue (i.e., behavior motivated by altruism is seen as morally superior), there appears to be an assumption that there should be a symmetry between the moral value of the motive and the moral value of the action.

One way to cast some light on this widely held assumption that there is a close relationship between the goodness of a motive and the goodness of the behavior that it motivates is to see how difficult it is to find counterexamples. There are three distinct ways to approach such a search. One could look at psychological analyses of evil behavior to determine if the antecedent motivations are commensurately "bad." Alternatively, one could reverse the order, looking at instances of "good" motives in search of instances in which the resulting behavior could be considered "bad." Finally one could search for instances in which less well regarded motives have led to desirable outcomes. Let us examine each in turn.

Some Failures of the "Good Motives Lead to Good Behavior" Assumption

Becker's (1975) Escape From Evil provides a potent introduction to the topic of antecedents of bad outcomes. It is a brilliant and moving little book that takes on the challenge of explaining the existence of evil on a large, societal scale. Taking the Holocaust as his paradigmatic example, Becker bases his explanation on three interacting motives. The first is the need to belong to a group, and the second is the need to rise above the group. Given the ubiquity and innocence of these familiar human motivations, one looks expectantly toward the third motive for something more powerful and more unacceptable. His third proposed motive thus comes as something of a surprise; it is to stamp out evil. In the context of Becker's examples it becomes clear that chaos or disorder serve as prime examples of the evil that people feel a need to stamp out. Taken as a whole, these three motives could as well describe the efforts of any of us who have tried to have our clarifying insights both accepted by the group and recog nized as memorable accomplishments.