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Focus on Human Behaviors
Focus on the positive aspects of human behaviors in relation to achieving human well-being and sustainability
Focus on the positive aspects of human behaviors in relation to achieving human well-being and sustainability
Sustainable development is fundamentally about how humans can work together and learn together to solve problems regarding the things we collectively care about sustaining. That is, sustainability is about human cooperation and innovation, topics that have become central to the sciences studying the evolution of human behavior and culture (e.g. Waring, 2010; Muthukrishna & Henrich, 2016; Tomasello, 2009).
Such challenges of sustainable development are not fundamentally new to us humans. Throughout our evolutionary history, our species has been confronted time and again with challenges of collaboration, collective decision-making, and the sharing of limited resources. This is because our ancestors lived in groups where everyone was “in the same boat” - everyone was dependent on preserving the group and its resources, both natural and social. These challenges have significantly shaped the cognitive and social skills, behaviors and cultures of our species.
However, the dynamic sustainability problems of this century require human cooperation and innovation on novel scales of social organization, as well as in more flexible and polycentric forms. This requires us to understand and further cultivate the conditions and evolved capacities for learning, working together, and flexibly exploring new ways to be. That is, we must harness our potential psychological and sociocultural flexibility towards individual and global aims of human well-being, equality, and sustainability (e.g. Henrich, 2016; Messner, Guarín, & Haun, 2013; Waring et al., 2015; Wilson, 2015; Wilson et al., 2014; Wilson, Ostrom, & Cox, 2013).
In this context, an understanding of the causes and consequences of human behavior, as well as of the causal relationships that have shaped our past, shape our present, and will shape our future, can help us understand today's challenges to human well-being and sustainable development. Understanding the context of these challenges is central to our capacities to evaluate possible solutions.
Thus, in the Global ESD design concept, our everyday experience of human behaviors, and an exploration of the human behaviors that cause and help address challenges of human well-being and sustainable development, serve as a focal point of instruction.
Thus, in the Global ESD design concept, our everyday experience of human behaviors, and an exploration of the human behaviors that cause and help address challenges of human well-being and sustainable development, serve as a focal point of instruction.
Exploring human behavior in the classroom offers many learning opportunities. Students of all grades, and humans in general, are very interested in human behavior - we experience it on a daily basis and we are constantly concerned with and imagine its causes and consequences. In addition, human behavior is implicitly or explicitly integrated in the curricula of many subjects, especially in biology, social studies, history, geography, and ethics. Also subjects like art, music, sports, language arts, are in fact about exploring certain aspects of human behaviors and characteristics, sometimes even having them in their name ("Music").
The research questions, methods and findings of evolutionary anthropology, behavioral science, psychology, and sustainability sciences offer unique opportunities to explore the causes and consequences of human behavior in the classroom. They thus can contribute to a fascinating and interdisciplinary education that connects to our shared everyday experience and is relevant to pressing societal challenges.
Why do we humans behave, feel, think, interact the way we do? How are each of us different as individuals? How are we all similar? What do we have in common with other forms of life? How might exploring these questions help us live towards what we care about, work with others, and create a preferred future?
We translate key cross-species, cross-developmental and cross-cultural research on the nature of human behavior into classroom materials. We also synthesize key concepts, principles and converging insights from this research into the essential questions and understandings which provide the focus and common thread for classroom content, activities, and discussions.
Michael Tomasello reflecting on the question "What makes us human?" in this inspiring video.
How would you answer this question?
"What makes us really different is our ability to put our heads together and to do things that neither one of us could do alone, to create new resources that neither of us could create alone. It's really all about communicating and collaborating and working together."
References
References
Henrich, J. (2016). The Secret of Our Success. How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Messner, D., Guarín, A., & Haun, D. (2013). The Behavioural Dimensions of International Cooperation. Duisburg,Germany. Retrieved from http://www.gcr21.org/en/publications/research-papers/gcrp-1/
Muthukrishna, M., & Henrich, J. (2016). Innovation in the Collective Brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1690), 20150192. http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192
Sapolsky, R. M. (2018). Behave. The Biology of Human at Our Best and Worst. Vintage Books.
Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Waring, T. M. (2010). New evolutionary foundations: Theoretical requirements for a science of sustainability. Ecological Economics, 69(4), 718–730. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2008.10.017
Waring, T. M., Kline, M. A., Brooks, J. S., Goff, S. H., Gowdy, J., Janssen, M. A., … Jacquet, J. (2015). A multilevel evolutionary framework for sustainability analysis. Ecology and Society, 20(2), art34. http://doi.org/10.5751/ES-07634-200234
Wilson, D. S. (2015). Does Altruism exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press.
Wilson, D. S., Ostrom, E., & Cox, M. E. (2013). Generalizing the core design principles for the efficacy of groups. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 90, S21–S32. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.010
Wilson, D. S., Hayes, S. C., Biglan, A., & Embry, D. D. (2014). Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of Intentional Change. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(4), 395–460. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X13001593
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