by: Julianne Boulton
We constantly hear that human actions are affecting our environment and that we need to be sustainable. We wonder why only a few people seem to care to take some action to save the world. The field of psychology may have an answer. In “The Psychology of Sustainable Behavior: Tips for empowering people to take environmentally positive action”, Christie Manning says that polls have shown that sometimes people who want to be sustainable do not act because they don’t not know how to. This may be a result of the phenomena that psychologists call “bystander confusion” or “the bystander effect”. This phenomenon that has even led to murders being ignored is a negative by-product of the human need to fit in.
Understanding “bystander confusion” can help us to successfully promote sustainable behavior. Christie explains this phenomenon with a hypothetical scenario. Suppose that there is a group of teenagers chasing another teenager on a relatively busy road. The bystanders don’t intervene because they are either uncertain if the teenagers are just chasing each other for fun or because they don’t know how they can help. At this time if someone yells “Call the police” then the bystanders know exactly what they need to do to help and would most probably call the police immediately. Here the person who yelled broke the cycle of in-activeness and told exactly how the other formerly inactive by standers can help. Inaction was the result of not knowing what to do rather than not wanting to do anything.
We can apply this into promoting sustainable behaviors. Running around telling people to save the world alone isn’t effective enough in promoting sustainable behaviors. Telling others why they need to save the world is not enough either. Instead we need to give people explicit information of the actions they can take to save the world. Telling people to be “green” might not even make any logical sense to some people. Telling them exactly what they need to do to be green, such as saying “turn the light off when you don’t need it” lets them know what they need to do. So go ahead and tell someone what they can do to be sustainable and stop the cycle of inaction.