Human Thinking/Human Concepts

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 We are an organization that firmly believes we have come up with a revolutionary development program.  We must do this now.  Let's come together, put our heads down, and work for a better, more enjoyable, and renewable life experience

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Changing behaviour is as important as changing technology. 
Yet behavioural science is neglected relative to technology R&D. Everyone understands the importance of scaling up wind, solar, and geothermal power, but when was the last time you heard a policymaker or pundit talk about scaling up the practical application of knowledge about how human beings think, interact, and make decisions?  

In their new paper, Behaviour and Energy Policy, Hunt Allcott of MIT and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard argue for taking such knowledge seriously:

Just as we use R&D to develop "hard science" into useful technological solutions, a similar process can be used to develop basic behavioral science into large-scale business and policy innovations. ... What has been missing is a concerted effort by researchers, policy-makers, and businesses to do the "engineering" work of translating behavioral science insights into scaled interventions, moving continuously from the laboratory to the field to practice. It appears that such an effort would have high economic returns.

That last sentence is a bit modest given the numbers Allcott and Mullainathan marshal. They've taken a close look at the results so far from behavioural programs in the field and the results are fairly astonishing.

Start with the most basic test: how much does it cost for a given climate solution to eliminate (abate) a metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions?With plug-in hybrid vehicles, that ton costs around $12. With wind power, it's $20. With carbon capture and storage at coal-fired power plants, it's $44.

What does the same ton of carbon abatement cost with behavioural programs? Minus $165.  That's not a typo. It's a negative sign. As in: $165 worth of profit per ton of carbon pollution reduced. If similar programs were expanded nationwide, Allcott and Mullainathan estimate a net value; savings minus costs; $2,220,000,000 a year. Of course much research and testing remains to be done before it's clear whether these programs perform equally well at scale, but as a first approximation, that's not too shabby!

Incidentally, some of the data comes from programs run by Opower, a Virginia-based company that works with utilities to apply behavioural science in a way that delivers energy efficiency. I've mentioned them before, and as it happens, President Obama visited them recently, commenting: "You can see the future in this company" So why isn't that a bigger story? Here's Opower's solution to reducing energy use:

Put a chart like this one on utility bills and get a 2% average drop in energy use. High-tech, huh? And it hardly costs the utilities anything! They already have the data. It's just a different way of presenting information, informed by good social science. As social psychologist (and Opower adviser) Robert Cialdini said when I talked with him, there's more than 50 years of scientific research on this stuff. It just hasn't been communicated broadly or translated into policy. 

Allcott & Mullainathan offer three policy recommendations. First, governments can provide funding for potentially high-impact behavioural programs as part of their broader support for energy innovation. A bill under consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives, HR 3247, would establish a program at the Department of Energy to understand behavioural factors that influence energy conservation and speed the adoption of promising initiatives. That bill, HR 3247, was sponsored by Washington's Rep. Brian Baird (D). He got it passed out of House Science and Technology Committee but right-wing media demagogues pitched a fit, saying it was government mind control. 

Second, through market incentives, policy-makers can encourage or fail to encourage private-sector firms to generate and utilize behavioural innovations that "nudge" consumers to make better choices. Historically, economists and policy-makers have focused on how regulation affects relative prices. In practice, however, firms interact with consumers in many ways in addition to pricing.

Third, government agencies often provide independent information disclosure, such as vehicle and appliance energy-efficiency ratings. This helps catalyze private-sector innovation by allowing firms to credibly convey the financial value of energy efficiency to consumers. The effect of information on choices, however, depends critically on how the information is conveyed, and government agencies should carefully consider behavioural factors in the disclosures they control.

For example: "The MPG Illusion".  The EPA rates fuel efficiency according to miles per gallon (MPG), which turns out to be misleading in all sorts of ways. If it instead reported based on gallons per mile (GPM), it would better inform consumers about the real value of efficiency and thereby lead to better choices. Most importantly, it would cost EPA virtually nothing. It's just a matter of applying knowledge about how people tick.

Behavioural psychology and neuroscience have shown the rational-choice ideal no longer holds water. When considering interventions, policy-makers usually focus on price, or information about prices. As Allcott and Mullainathan note, this focus derives from the the rational choice theory of traditional economics. John Gowdy of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in "Behavioural Economics and Climate Change Policy," puts it this way:

The axioms of consumer choice -- the starting point of traditional economic theory -- have been re-cast as testable hypotheses and these assumptions have come up short as defendable scientific characterizations of human behavior. It is no longer tenable for economists to claim that the self-regarding, rational actor model offers a satisfactory description of human decision making. Nor do humans consistently act "as if" they obey the laws of rational choice theory...Ironically, the rational actor model seems to be most appropriate for animals with limited cognitive ability and perhaps humans making the simplest kinds of choices. For the most important decisions humans make, culture, institutions, and give-and-take interactions are critical and should be central to any behavioural model.

Much of behavioural economics has been devoted to debunking rational choice theory, but a positive alternative is just beginning to emerge, a kind of unified theory of human behaviour that harmonizes research from economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology.

Dave Roberts is a staff writer at Grist, producing scientifically-literate environmental journalism  He has a good-humoured, straightforward explanatory style we appreciate. Check out his work via Grist's free e-newsletter and archives.

Globe in classroom, New Orleans by Chris Jordan from "In Katrina's Wake" (2005)

I believe we are heading into the eye of a perfect storm, which threatens the human race and a great deal of nature. I think it is extremely important that we all stop denying just how dangerous, insane and savage this perfect storm of crises is, and just what it means for all of us and the world. I think you know what those crises are. There is a holocaust going on that the doomsayers had predicted. There is a retreat among many of the major religions into fundamentalism, which disorders our unity. There is the domination of a kind of corporate magnate who is brutal and addicted to power, exploitation and greed. The mass media, largely owned by corporations, is filling our minds with violence, trash and celebrity trivia, at the very moment where you and I need to be inspired, galvanized and given the authentic information.

There is a lifestyle, which you and I both live, hectic, driven and multi-tasking, which makes it almost impossible for even the most well-meaning of us to have the kind of pleasure and peace in which to hear the voice of the soul that could guide us. When you bring all of these crises together, and factor in the population explosion, what we are looking at is a perfect storm of interrelated crises that are all manifestations of a selective force - human self. This human self has lost the most fundamental connection of all, the connection with the sacred nature of creation and of life. I think it is very important that we all wake up fast, because all those who are not awake now are going to be, very soon. The crisis is not going to relent and it is going to get very much fiercer very soon.

I believe this storm of crises is an evolutionary possibility of unprecendented intensity. It gives us the opportunity to gaze into the mirror of our destiny, and to see very clearly, that unless you and I evolve to the next level of putting our deepest principles and holiest compassion and greatest passion for life into direct, clear. radical action on every level, we will simply not survive. This great death we are living, that we are manifesting out of addiction, greed, extraordinary apathy and fantastic lack of concern for life is also potentially the birth canal of an unprecedented birth. A chastened, humbled humanity, opened at last by tragedy, awakened by the knowledge of the shadow may really claim our innate, sacred consciousness, start acting from our heart and turn apocalypse into grace, nightmare into opportunity, redeem terrible tragedy by gathering together on a massive scale to transform the world.

This crisis is the equivalent on a global scale of a crisis that a mystic goes through at a certain moment on the path. In Christian mysticism it is called the 'Dark Night of the Soul'. In the metaphysical systems of Mahayana Buddhism, it is the shattering of the false or created self. Can humanity see this immense consciousness as a God-sent, God-given, God-ordained opportunity to unlearn all our dangerous attainments? If humanity could settle in the deep ground of divine inspiration and learn how to go through the shattering ordeal with authentic grace, authentic commitment to transformation, then not only will we survive, but humanity will be transformed and born into an authentic divine nature, through the death of the collective false self that is manifesting this great death and wrecking everything. What is there in us that can birth a divine humanity, transformed by tragedy, illumined by shattering knowledge and transfigured by divine grace? What force can give us the power to turn this devastating situation around?

Four years after my teacher Father Bede Griffiths died, I had a dream in which he showed me two rivers. One was a river of fire going toward the sea. The other was a river of even more intense fire. They met at the sea in a glorious, radiant, divine explosion of energy. I heard a voice saying, "These two rivers are the two noblest forces of the human psyche. They are the river of the mystic's passion for God and the river of the activist's passion for justice. When these two rivers meet, a third fire is born that is ordained to transform everything. It the fire of divine compassion and love in action."

The vision gave me a term Sacred Activism and in honour of that I wrote a book. If you believe, as I do, that we are facing extreme danger together with extreme opportunity, I ask you in the name of Buddha to get up at three o'clock in the morning someday soon, surround yourself with the peace of God in whichever way you understand it, and ask youself one question. Which of all the causes in this beleaguered, damaged world breaks my heart the most? Please dare to ask yourself this question, and dare to listen to what your heart says to you. If you do, your heart will reveal to you a sacred mission that belongs just to you, and that will be the deepest and most radiant voice of your soul. You will be given at that moment, an injunction and a direction. What you can do then is to join with other people with a similar heartbreak, and work together in your local community, to do something real about what it is that you advocate in yourself.

I talk about this vision of sacred activism widely, and I am also involved in a way of grounding it in the world called Networks of Grace. These networks are going to be cells of six to twelve people gathered around a heartbreak, or a profession, or a passion, dedicating in their local communities to start a grassroots, radical revolution of the third power; Love in Action. It is the only way we will get a chance for it to work. If we wait for corporations to transform our situation, we will wait until the last tree is burnt down. If we wait for politicians to have a major spiritual transformation and suddenly give millions away and start feeding the poor, we will be waiting for the last animal to disappear. This revolution of the soul in action depends upon you and me. We are getting real about the tragedy of where we are now, the opportunity of where we can go, and the heartbreak you and I feel. When we get real about these things, we are impelled to come together in networks of grace and do something about it. 

The above is the transcript of a talk by mystical scholar, poet & translator Andrew Harvey at the NYC launch of Bhikkhu Bodhi's Buddhist Global Relief project