Getting In Our Heads
The Bear on Aug 24 2008 at 8:28 am | Filed under: Global Warming
Environment: The power of persuasion. Psychologists say they have it and aim to use it to persuade us that we need to be more sensitive to protecting the Earth.
But that’s putting it mildly. If we were looser with our words, we’d say the 148,000-member American Psychological Association plans to condition the public so that, in the words of Douglas Vakoch, clinical psychologist at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, today’s “increased environmental concern” won’t “become just another fashionable trend.”
Among the agenda items from the group’s meeting last week in Boston, USA Today reported, were stepped-up “efforts to foster a broader sense of eco-sensitivity that the group believes will translate into more public action to protect the planet.”
“We know how to change behavior and attitudes. That is what we do,” association president and Yale University psychologist Alan Kazdin told the newspaper. “We know what messages will work and what will not.”
To that end, USA Today says, APA leaders want to launch a “national initiative specifically targeting behavior changes, including developing media messages that will help people reduce their carbon footprint and pay more attention to ways they can conserve.
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