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A renaissance of animism
Published in Jonathan Chapman, Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design, 2017
Tim Ingold has addressed what he has labeled the ‘logic of inversion,’ according to which ‘the person, acting and perceiving within a nexus of intertwined relationships, is presumed to behave according to the directions of cultural models or cognitive schemata installed inside his or her head’ (Ingold, 2006, p11). Thus a person is not able to experience the world the way it truly is but is ‘sealed off by an outer boundary or shell that protects their inner constitution from the traffic of interactions with their surroundings’ (ibid.). When accepting a Darwinian evolution of the brain itself, it becomes plausible that individuals experience life on several epistemological levels simultaneously. Thus, it becomes plausible that the most archaic level of the human brain has set the basic belief that all things are acting entities as a default position. From the research of paleoanthropology, primatology, archaeology and genetics we now know that the vast majority of our evolutionary history was tribal, nomadic and sustainable and thus radically different to life today (Diamond, 2005, 2012; Wilson, 2012). If we just paid attention, we would realize that we are often ill adjusted to the niche we have designed around ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years. Hominids living in small tribes of hunter-gatherers evolved a decision-making pattern for archaic – not modern – circumstances and if that pattern led to their survival then their descendants’ – our – heads hold a similar pattern to solve challenges today. Since cultural evolution has been much faster than biological evolution, however, our mental algorithms are often inept for the travesties of modern life. Science writer Michael Shermer puts it this way:What may seem like irrational behavior today may have actually been rational 100,000 years ago. Without an evolutionary perspective, the assumptions of Homo economicus – that ‘Economic Man’ is rational, self-maximizing and efficient in making choices – make no sense.Shermer, 2008
What next for energy-related building regulations?: the occupancy phase
Published in Building Research & Information, 2018
Kirsten Gram-Hanssen, Susse Georg, Ellen Christiansen, Per Heiselberg
There has been, and still is, widespread confidence amongst EU and national policy-makers that feedback on energy consumption to households, based on digitization of metering, will motivate consumers to save energy (as seen, for example, in the EU’s Strategic Energy Technology Plan and its integrated roadmap; see https://setis.ec.europa.eu/low-carbon-technologies/consumers-energy-system). However, this approach has been criticized for relying on assumptions of consumers as being Homo oeconomicus, whose behaviours are guided by economically rationally decisions (Strengers, 2013). This understanding of human behaviour is far from the one described above, in which energy consumption is considered a by-product of different unconscious habits related to performing different everyday practices. Review studies of the literature on the effect of providing feedback to consumers confirm, furthermore, that this often has little influence on actual consumption, even though well-designed feedback schemes may be able to deliver savings of a few per cent (Darby, 2010; Darby, Liddell, Hills, & Drabble, 2015).
Environmental resilience and intergovernmental collaboration in the Pearl River Delta
Published in International Journal of Water Resources Development, 2018
This article applies institutional analysis to the two settings characterizing the Pearl River Delta’s water governance environment: agencies as actors and transboundary regions as institutionally complex action situations. This study’s theoretical presumption is that government behaviour can be understood through the concept of utility maximization, which has been used to examine individual rationality in studies by neoclassical game theorists (e.g. Axelrod, 1984; Binmore, 1998; Gintis, 2000) and cognitive psychologists (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Simon, 1957). This requires several assumptions about Homo economicus, including access to complete information, consistent ordering of preferences, and maximization of personal net benefits. Analytically convenient in its predictability, this seminal concept has been critiqued for not accommodating the messy realities of imperfect markets and personal irrationalities. The proposition that humans are ‘fallible learners’ with mercurial preferences (Ostrom, 1998) and constrained by Simon’s concept of bounded rationality (self-serving decision making with only limited information) has also eroded the credibility of rational actor assumptions. Despite these limitations, this study assumes that agencies – compelled by public expectation and some degree of accountability – act rationally for their own interests given constraints imposed by legislation and power dynamics.
The User Affective Experience Scale: A Measure of Emotions Anticipated in Response to Pop-Up Computer Warnings
Published in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2018
Ross Buck, Mohammad Khan, Michael Fagan, Emil Coman
Decision-making involves choosing an optimal course of action when multiple alternatives are available. Such choices typically involve risk, defined as uncertainty about outcomes whose probability is known (Loewenstein, Rick, & Cohen, 2008). Traditional economic theories of humans as homo economicus suggest that human beings are rational actors motivated to cope with risk by maximizing the expected utility of outcomes. From this point of view, emotional effects on decision-making were thought to be largely disruptive and contrary to rational thought. However, it is now understood that the traditional model is incomplete, and that emotions can also contribute positively to decision-making. For example, the risk as feelings hypothesis suggests that when there is tension between rational evaluations and feelings, behavior tends to be determined by emotions (Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001).