ABSTRACT
Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 of Psychology for Sustainability, 5th edition, comprise the section Psychology for a Sustainable Future, which reviews psychological theory and research relevant to sustainable and unsustainable behavior. This chapter covers human cognitive processing. It begins by introducing two human thinking systems: the slow and deliberate analytic system and the fast and intuitive automatic system. The chapter continues by describing the limitations and sources of error arising from these two systems that often result in unsustainable behavior. First, thinking is constrained by processes such as sensory adaptation, psychological distance, and temporal discounting. Second, thinking may be biased by the availability heuristic, loss aversion, moral licensing, the better-than-average bias, or the optimism bias. Third, the brain is motivated to maintain its worldview and selectively accepts or ignores certain pieces of information because of belief perseverance, the confirmation bias, selective exposure, solution aversion, and system justification. Fourth, human thinking is heavily influenced by emotional processes such as coping, climate fatalism, mortality salience, and terror management. The final section of this chapter proposes several ways human cognition may be harnessed to create a more sustainable world. These include making invisible environmental issues salient through visualization; increasing the personal relevance of sustainability with storytelling, legacy motivation, or framing; eliciting self-transcendent emotions such as caring, empathy, or awe and avoiding a collapse of compassion; inoculating against misinformation; and providing the effectiveness knowledge, systems knowledge, or mental models people need to take sustainable action.
