Читать книгу The Psychology of Environmental Law - Arden Rowell - Страница 26

Behaviors that incur costs or benefits for a third party create what economists call externalities, or spillovers. The full costs (and benefits) of externalities are not experienced by those who generate them, often because the effects are distant from their cause in space and/or time. As economists have long noted, unless there are adequate incentives to internalize them, rational and self-interested people will produce negative externalities (Pigou, 1920; Coase, 1960; Ostrom, 1990). Indeed, creating adequate incentives to internalize the social cost of environmental injury provides the primary economic justification for environmental regulation (Baumol & Oates, 1988; Stavins, 2019).

As environmental economists have explained, a well-functioning environment is a public good: All can benefit from it, whether or not they individually contribute to it, because those who created it cannot effectively shut out those who did not (Olson, 1965). This creates the potential for public goods dilemmas, and particularly for “free riding,” where people capture benefits for themselves while creating externalities for others (Baumol, 1952). The economic notion of free riding is straightforward: People like free things, so if someone can get the benefits of something without having to pay for it, then that person has the incentive not to contribute. They will just take without giving. When the same opportunity arises for multiple people, it can generate what is now famously called the “tragedy of the commons”: degradation, even collapse, of common resources as a result of individual incentives to overuse (Hardin, 1968). Land may be overgrazed to the point of barrenness; fisheries may be fished to the point of extinction; the air may be clogged with smoke, soot, and heat-entrapping greenhouse gases.

Precisely because the environment is external to every individual, the environment provides countless and pervasive opportunities for generating externalities. In fact, by definition, a person who takes an action that affects the environment has created an externality. So it should be no surprise that much of the field of environmental economics is devoted to identifying and managing them (Stavins, 2019). What may be surprising—particularly with the behavioral turn that economics has taken in the last decade—is that although environmental economics often incorporates rich understandings of social norms (see, e.g., Ostrom, 1990), the psychology of externalities has been largely neglected.

This is a missed opportunity, as psychology has much to say about how externalities are perceived and how those perceptions may relate to the motives, biases, and social influences that lead people either to free ride by externalizing harm, or instead to engage in pro-environmental behaviors that externalize benefits. What mental states, for instance, allow people to engage in behavior that they know will harm others—to generate negative externalities? Psychological research suggests that people are reluctant to engage in behavior they recognize as harming others—behavior widely viewed as antisocial (Bandura, 2002; Gini, 2006; Bandura, 2015). As a result, people tend to use one (or many) of a series of psychological mechanisms to morally and cognitively disengage, minimize, and protect themselves from negative feelings—such as guilt or shame—that otherwise follow from harming others (Bandura 1991, 2002). These include the following techniques of what is sometimes called “moral disengagement”:

 • Moral justification. Portraying the act as serving moral ends (“We have to use this pesticide to keep people from getting sick!”).

 • Palliative comparisons. Making harmful acts look better by comparing them to even worse acts (“Sure, I emit greenhouse gases, but my emissions are tiny compared to the whole country.”).

 • Euphemistic labeling. Using language to minimize the emotional aspects of the harm (“endangered species” rather than “dying species”; discussing the killing of aquatic organisms in water-cooling intake systems as “entrainment” or “entrapment” rather than “squashing” or “smashing”; referring to “debeaking” of chickens rather than “mutilation”).

 • Displacement. Obscuring or minimizing one’s agentive role in the harm being caused (“Yes, airplane emissions are bad for the climate, but I have no choice—I have to travel for work.”).

 • Diffusion of responsibility. Obscuring or minimizing one’s obligations or ability to mitigate the harm (“I can see that there is a problem that needs to be resolved, but other people are more capable or more responsible for fixing it than me.”).

 • Minimizing consequences. Disregarding, distorting, or downplaying the consequences (“It’s not like me riding my bike to work is going to magically fix local air quality”; “One more plastic bag isn’t going to do anything that isn’t already done.”).

 • Depersonalization and dehumanization. Grouping victims with animals or as a group rather than as individuals (“It’s just a bunch of animals/foreigners anyway.”).

 • Psychic numbing. The larger the size of the externality, the less important any subset of it is (“If hundreds of species go extinct every year, then what difference does it make if a few more go?”).

 • Attribution of blame. Blaming victims or portraying them as threats (“If people don’t like living near trash dumps, it’s their fault for not moving.”).

 • Pluralistic ignorance. Not recognizing there is a problem because no one else is doing anything about it (“If it were really a problem, the government would have outlawed it by now.”).

For purposes of regulating environmental externalities, the important implication of this line of psychological research is that moral disengagement may lead nonsadistic individuals to systematically underperceive the extent of the externalities they cause. It is as if one’s own externalities are perceived through a psychologically concave lens, making objects appear smaller than they actually are. Disturbingly, this effect will often be subconscious, and it may also be resistant to many attempts to debias, because convincing someone that they have harmed others more than they realized risks triggering the same protective emotional and cognitive mechanisms that led to the initial moral disengagement (Bandura, 2015). As we discuss in subsequent chapters, this may lead polluters to inadvertently (but perhaps stubbornly) minimize the likely effects of their pollution, and may lead individuals to psychologically discount the effects of their greenhouse gas emissions. Counterintuitively, this may also mean that public policy communications that emphasize the scope and scale of environmental harm in an attempt to generate urgency and pro-environmental responses risk triggering denial and other minimization strategies. The exact extent of such consequences, however, is ripe for additional empirical research.

Moral disengagement is peculiarly relevant to the psychology of externalities, because it informs what happens when a person externalizes harm on another. The tendency to minimize the harm that one does to others may be further exacerbated when those harms are distant in space and time.