Sustainability and Behavior

These challenges require an unprecedented level of cooperation at every level of society, including the global scale. What can we learn from the communities of the world, from our evolutionary history, from our everyday behaviors and experiences, and from other living beings about how to navigate these challenges of cooperation? Research from biology, psychology, economics, anthropology, behavioral and sustainability science provides insights into the conditions and principles for sustainable cooperation across a diversity of contexts. In this light, an understanding of the origins and complex dynamics of human social behavior can help students understand today's challenges of collaboration and collective problem-solving around our shared interests in a better future. 

Sustainable development is about working together to create and sustain shared natural and social resources .

Common-pool resources (also known as a commons) are resources that are shared by a community and are limited in some way. Often, the more someone uses the resource, the less there is left for the others in the community. Examples of commons are groundwater supplies, fisheries, forests, the atmosphere, public roads and parks, the budget of a community project, even the amount of time in a classroom can be considered as a shared resource in this way. There is often a dilemma in using such resources: the individual may have an interest in using as much of the resource as possible (or contributing as little as possible to preserving the resource or achieving a project's goal). After all, their behavior has no immediate negative consequences. Problems can arise when too many people in the community do so, potentially endangering the entire resource, with negative consequences for all. 

This is called the 'tragedy of the commons', an important concept in evolutionary, behavioral, and sustainability sciences.

Ostrom's 8 principles for successful cooperation

1 Group identity and common goals: It is clear and accepted locally, who belongs to a group, and all members have common goals.

2 Fair distribution of costs and benefits: The costs incurred by members of a cooperation are distributed in proportion to their benefits from the cooperation.

3 Collaborative decision-making: Most individuals in the group can participate in decisions that affect them, set or change the rules of the game.

4 Monitoring agreed upon behaviors: The community observes and monitors how a resource is used by all, how its condition develops, whether everyone behaves according to the rules, and to what extent common goals are achieved.

5 Graduated responding to helpful and unhelpful behavior: Rewards for valued behaviors and sanctions for misbehaviors start at a low level (e.g. friendly discussion), and are increased in proportion to the contribution or detriment of the behavior towards the group.

6 Fast and fair conflict resolution: There are local arenas and mechanisms for the quick, efficient and direct resolution of conflicts among members or with other groups.

7 Recognition of rights and autonomy: the group has a minimum of rights to set its own rules in relation to its sphere of common purpose.

8 Nested institutions: Groups are nested on many levels, with each level requiring principles 1-7 (polycentric governance).

Depending on context, further auxilliary principles can be important for group cooperation.

Homo oeconomicus or Homo sapiens?

For a long time in economics, the model of homo oeconomicus was considered an acceptable approach to describing human nature and behavior: According to this model, humans are mostly self-serving, rational maximizers of material profit, primarily interested in drawing as much of it as possible from the environment and from relationships with others in the short term. If one wants people to behave in a certain way, one only has to create enough material incentives, e.g. through discounts, bonuses, penalties, taxes, etc. 

Garrett Hardin's prediction that the sustainable use of a common-pool resource can be realized only through privatization or central government was based on the assumption that people generally act in the pattern of Homo oeconomicus.

However, in the last two-three decades, this model and its utility has been more and more questioned. The research field of behavioral economics has begun to investigate how people actually behave in relationships and interactions with other people - does their behavior reflect the model of Homo oeconomicus?

Some findings from behavioral economics:

• Humans often do not act as "selfishly" as had been assumed. Humans seem to care about having a good conscience, prosocial values ​​and respecting social norms. Humans do not seem to be only striving for material profit. Even the meaning of the terms "selfishness" and "altruism" had to be rethought (e.g. is it selfish when someone helps another person because it feels good?).

• Humans often do not act as "rationally" as had been supposed. People often act intuitively, guided by (social) emotions, intuitions and internalized social norms (e.g. an intuitive sense of "How do others around me behave? What behavior do others expect from me?"). Even the meaning of the term "rationality" had to be rethought (e.g. is it irrational if someone acts by a gut feeling, when the consequence of the action nonetheless contributes to the person's long-term well-being?)

• Humans care a lot about what other people think of them and their social identity. Humans care about status, standing out and/or fitting in. 

• Humans are often (but not always) capable and willing to organize collectively for the common good (e.g. for the sustainable use of community resources, or contributing to the creative commons), without private property or top-down management, and they accept personal costs for doing it.

• Material incentives (e.g. monetary rewards) can "backfire" or become a "self-fulfilling prophecy". People can become material profit maximizers (i.e. homo economicus) if they feel that other people are also self-interested material maximizers or if it is perceived that social preferences, values ​​and social norms do not matter to other people around them.

Most of these findings are actually familiar to us from our own everyday experience. 

The question is what factors influence people's behavior - what role do emotions, beliefs and intuitions, individual experiences, genes, growing up in a particular social and cultural environment with certain norms, institutions, and technologies, and immediate environmental conditions play? And how can or should we use answers to these questions to promote the achievement of societal goals for human well-being and sustainable development?

Our behavior is strongly influenced by external environmental conditions, even if we are often unaware of it.

In behavioral economics, the method of nudging uses this fact. Nudging is a method of predictably influencing people's behavior without resorting to "carrot and sticks" methods like direct prohibitions, imperatives, or economic incentives, but rather by slighly changing environmental conditions or messages in order to nudge people's intuitions. The goal of behavioral change should be in the interest of the affected individuals and/or in the interest of wider society. Thus, e.g. cigarette advertising is not a nudge (because the intended behavior is mainly in the interest of the cigarette manufacturer), while warnings on cigarette packets are nudges (because the desired behavior is in the long-term interest of the affected individual and society). Those nudges that aim to promote more environmentally friendly or sustainable behavior in people, are often called green nudges.

The justification of nudging lies in the fact that human behavior is strongly influenced by unconsciously perceived environmental stimuli, whether we like it or not. Thus, the strategic change of environmental factors may help people to make decisions and behave more according to their actual goals and values.

However, the principle of nudging is also much debated and criticized because it lurks the danger of justifying behavioral manipulations that may not correspond to the interests and values ​​of those affected. 

(There is also a philosophical question around the concept of "autonomy" - what do insights of cognitive and neuroscience tell us about how much of a "free will" or autonomy we really have...)

more on this:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory 

• Thaler, R. H. & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press.

Sense of fairness

Fair distribution of resources, costs and benefits among members, as well as fair processes of decision making and conflict resultion, are among the conditions for the sustainable development of a community (see above, Ostrom's principles 2, 3, 5, 6). 

Because of the importance of group life in the course of human evolution, a sense of fairness is part of our evolutionary heritage. Our sense of fairness is one of our human "moral intuitions". Almost all people, regardless of their culture or social background, seem to have a sense of fairness, even if groups and humans vary in how it manifests itself and in what situations it is expressed. 

What seems fair is often dependend on the context, the affected group, and one's own role in a situation. For example, people care about fairness in relation to different kinds of groups, sometimes people care more about fairness as "equal benefits for everyone", sometimes people care more about "benefits in proportion to contribution", sometimes people care more about "more benefits for those in need", and probably many of us feel something in between depending on the situation.  Because of these different and context-dependent meanings of fairness, there is often disagreement between people about what is"fair". In many conflicts in everyday life and in society, our sense of fairness comes into play. 

So through behavioral science, we now know about the conditions that favor or hinder humans to cooperate towards shared goals, including sustaining shared resources and many other sustainable development goals. 

We also now know a lot about the aspects of human evolved behavior that favor or hinder humans to behave in a way that is best for themselves and everyone in the long term. Can we use this understanding to actually affect change in the world - in ourselves and in our communities?

Prosocial is one approach that is doing just that.

see more under: 

Teaching materials/Prosocial

Community Science

• Atkins, P. W. B., Wilson, D. S., & Hayes, S. C. (2019). Prosocial. Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups. Oakland, CA, USA: Context Press.

• Basurto, X., & Ostrom, E. (2009). Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons. Economia Delle Fonti Di Energia e Dell’ambiente, 35–60. https://doi.org/10.3280/EFE2009-001004

• Bateson, M., Nettle, D., & Roberts, G. (2006). Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting. Biology Letters, 2(3), 412–414. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2006.0509

• Bowles, S., & Polanía-Reyes, S. (2012). Economic incentives and social preferences: Substitutes or complements? Journal of Economic Literature, 50(2), 368–425. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.50.2.368

• Cialdini, R. B., & Schultz, W. (2004). Understanding and motivating energy conservation via social norms. William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

• Cohn, A., Maréchal, M. A., Tannenbaum, D., & Zünd, C. L. (2019). Civic honesty around the globe. Science, 8712(June), eaau8712. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau8712

• Felsen, G., & Reiner, P. B. (2011). How the neuroscience of decision making informs our conception of autonomy. AJOB Neuroscience, 2(3), 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/21507740.2011.580489

• Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York, NY, USA: Pantheon Books.

• Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162(June), 1243–1248. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243

• Henrich, J., Boyd, R. T., Bowles, S., Camerer, C. F., Fehr, E., & Gintis, H. (2004). Foundations of Human Sociality. Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.

• Koomen, R., & Herrmann, E. (2018). Chimpanzees overcome the tragedy of the commons with dominance. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 10389. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-28416-8 

• Koomen, R., & Herrmann, E. (2018). An investigation of children’s strategies for overcoming the tragedy of the commons. Nature Human Behaviour, 2, 348–355. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0327-2

• Ostrom, E. (2009). A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems. Science, 325(5939), 419–422. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.1172133 

• Thaler, R. H. & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. 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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.010