Exam 6: Its Not Easy Thinking Green

Describe the two systems of thinking discussed in the text. How does understanding these systems and their relationship to each other help explain why people's behavior in industrialized societies is likely to be unsustainable?

In a research study, participants read about a senator responding to pressure to vote against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. What did the researchers find?

Environmental organizations direct a lot of resources toward increasing people's knowledge about environmental issues. Research suggest that greater knowledge about environmental issues

Learning which behaviors are the most effective to promote sustainability

How do green defaults take advantage of the two systems of thinking to encourage sustainable behavior?

People tend to overestimate the risk of unprecedented and unknown threats.

People's reluctance to change their lifestyles to be more sustainable may be partly explained by

Researchers have found that 11% of people in the United States hold a completely false mental model of climate change, equating it with

Positive emotional states lead to

It is the logical, analytic thinking system that controls most of our daily decisions and actions.

Without changing situational cues, it can be very difficult to change automatic habits.

When researchers asked U.S. residents about the first thought or image that came to mind regarding global warming, the majority reported images that were distant from their daily lives.

If you were to ask U.S. college students what comes to mind when they think of global warming, the least likely image would probably be

Like Skinner's insight about the relative merits of punishment and reinforcement, researchers have found that eliciting negative emotions ________________ eliciting positive emotions.

Acting on ""autopilot"" in industrialized society usually means behaving unsustainably.

Efforts to change environmental thinking, such as informational campaigns, typically rest on the assumption that

Because anxiety and fear powerfully motivate action, scaring people is an effective strategy for motivating environmentally responsible behavior.

In modern industrialized society, people's lives tend to be busy, stressful, and overloaded with information. Under such circumstances, people tend to

Which of the following best describes the availability heuristic?

Human sensory organs are good at picking up abrupt changes but poor at perceiving slow, incremental shifts.