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Max Bazerman
“It is an error to assume that everybody uses the same thought process."
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I’m interested in the fact that people claim they want to leave their children a world in as good a condition as they received it, yet their behaviors are quite incompatible with that goal. And that can go from the biggest issues like climate change, to regional issues like the over-harvesting of fisheries, to day-to-day issues like our propensity to drive SUVs when we don’t need them. . .
I look at this problem of all talk and little action and ask why we do so little? The answer, at least part of the answer, comes from thinking about how the human mind works. When I look I see some common human behaviors repeated across a wide array of issues from financial decisions, to public policy decisions, to environmental decisions. There is a set of cognitive biases that seem to grab hold of the decisions and determine an outcome that is frequently not in the best long-term interest. Cognitive issues are, at least, a partial explanation for why we say one thing but do another. . .
Imagine you have one job and you get another job offer. Most of the time there are some things about the new job that are better and some things that are worse. A purely logical human mind would simply weigh the gains versus losses of the new job and see how they balance out. But what we know is that. . . losses loom larger than gains. This means that when you have to give up on some dimensions to gain on other dimensions, we weight the losses more. Your personal balance sheet needs to show a gain that is far greater than the losses in order to make the new job attractive enough to take. If there is anything close to an even split between gains and losses, expect inaction. People just do not handle the risk of loss well in their decision making.
The problem is that over-weighing losses prejudices us toward inaction. The need for an overwhelming case for action rather than just a logical case for action is a barrier to change in all kinds of environmental issues. If you think about a major issue, like climate change, a fundamental problem is the very real, very significant short-term costs. Now, the people who know a lot more about this than me, like the excellent climatologists working on the issue, would argue that the long-term benefits of stopping climate change dwarf the costs of taking action today. But the costs are in the here and now and loom large compared to distant gains. Using this insight from a cognitive perspective helps us understand why people aren’t making wiser, long-term decisions. That means the first thing you can do to manage things differently is recognize the need to consciously manage cognitive biases. . .
If you don’t manage cognitive biases there is a pretty good chance they will manage you. . .
Broadly speaking, the goal of natural resource managers is to make wise or rational decisions from a long-term perspective. What we end up doing all too often is sub-optimizing in a wide variety of ways. The cognitive biases and some of the other things that we’ve talked about, like decision heuristics, all limit our rationality. Working to get around these decision making problems is, to me, productive conservation work.