Last post, I talked about how doing things to save the environment is often difficult for people. Often, environmentally sustainable actions require some sacrifice in the short-term in order to achieve a long-term benefit. People find these short-term/long-term tradeoffs difficult.
That said, when we look around the world, there are people who eat only foods grown locally. They use low-water washing machines. They take the bus to work. They do make sacrifices for the environment. What is up with these people?
For some, the value of saving the environment for the future is so important that actions that harm the environment are painful enough for them in the here-and-now they can't perform them. For these people, there is no short-term/long-term tradeoff.
A more interesting group, though is the group of people that learns sustainable behavior. After all, if you're not already the kind of person who routinely acts to save the environment, then if you are ever going to act in a more sustainable way, you're going to have to learn to do it.
Here is where the human habit-learning system comes in.
Whenever I teach my Introduction to Cognitive Psychology course, I remind everyone (early and often) that the human cognitive system is designed as much as possible not to think. That is, we are designed to act automatically as much as possible without having to think about our actions.
Behaviors become automatic when people repeatedly take an action when they are in a particular situation. The motivational system then does a number of things to reinforce these automatic behaviors so that they will be carried out again in the future. For one, whenever a situation comes up again in the future, the cognitive system suggests the action that has been carried out in the past. For example, you might want to start buying food from a local organic farmer's market that happens on Saturday mornings at 9am. The first few weeks, you might have to drag yourself out of bed and think about going, and take the effort to go to the farmer's market to buy food grown locally. Eventually, though, Saturday morning itself will remind you that it is time to go to the farmer's market.
In addition, once this behavior becomes a habit, your motivational system will get persistent. Not only will the habitual action assert itself to you, but it will begin to nag you. That is, your body and mind will begin to tell you that it is time to go to the farmer's market, and thoughts of the market will stay with you. So, your habit learning system will start to make the farmer's market more like sex. Suddenly, you'll have a hard time avoiding thoughts of that farmer's market on Saturdays, because it has become your routine.
But wait, there's more! The habit system also operates so that when other temptations arise, you will be reminded of what you do habitually. Ayelet Fishbach, Ron Friedman, and Arie Kruglanski did studies demonstrating that when faced with a temptation that would stop people from performing an action they do habitually, their motivational system increased the availability of thoughts about the habitual action. In this example, finding out about a tempting television program on Saturday morning would actually call to mind the farmer's market, which would remind you that you should be going.
That means that there is hope for us to overcome the short-term/long-term tradeoff. All we need to do is to perform sustainable behaviors a few times. Those first few times might be difficult, because we have to force ourselves to do something whose benefit is primarily in the long-term. Eventually, though, our habit learning system will make these behaviors feel necessary and important (if not exactly like sex).
Finally, I should remind you that this works for behaviors that are habits. That means that behaviors like buying a car, which you will do only once every few years at most are unlikely to be affected by the habit learning system. Big choices like this probably will be difficult ones to make. However, if you have already developed lots of sustainable habits, then perhaps you will start to think of yourself as the sort of person who does things that are good for the environment.
