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Human nature and environmentally responsible behavior - 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. | Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 56, No. 3, 2000, pp. 491–508 Human Nature and Environmentally Responsible Behavior Stephen Kaplan* University of Michigan 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 *Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Stephen Kaplan, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI .