Conservation and human behaviour: lessons from social psychology

2010 ◽  
Vol 37 (8) ◽  
pp. 658 ◽  
Author(s):  
Freya A. V. St John ◽  
Gareth Edwards-Jones ◽  
Julia P. G. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Resource Use ◽  
Biodiversity Loss ◽  
Subjective Norms ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Human Decision ◽  
Improved Design ◽  
Species Declines

Despite increased effort from non-governmental organisations, academics and governments over recent decades, several threats continue to cause species declines and even extinctions. Resource use by a growing human population is a significant driver of biodiversity loss, so conservation scientists need to be interested in the factors that motivate human behaviour. Economic models have been applied to human decision making for many years; however, humans are not financially rational beings and other characteristics of the decision maker (including attitude) and the pressure that people perceive to behave in a certain way (subjective norms) may influence decision making; these are characteristics considered by social psychologists interested in human decision making. We review social-psychology theories of behaviour and how they have been used in the context of conservation and natural-resource management. Many studies focus on general attitudes towards conservation rather than attitudes towards specific behaviours of relevance to conservation and thus have limited value in designing interventions to change specific behaviours (e.g. reduce hunting of a threatened species). By more specifically defining the behaviour of interest, and investigating attitude in the context of other social-psychological predictors of behaviour (e.g. subjective norms, the presence of facilitating factors and moral obligation), behaviours that have an impact on conservation goals will be better understood, allowing for the improved design of interventions to influence them.

scholarly journals Interactions between human behaviour and ecological systems

2012 ◽  
Vol 367 (1586) ◽  
pp. 270-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. J. Milner-Gulland
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Resource Use ◽  
Research Effort ◽  
Biodiversity Loss ◽  
Ecological Systems ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Direct Effects ◽  
Conservation Policies ◽  
Human Decision ◽  
Conservation Interventions

Research on the interactions between human behaviour and ecological systems tends to focus on the direct effects of human activities on ecosystems, such as biodiversity loss. There is also increasing research effort directed towards ecosystem services. However, interventions to control people's use of the environment alter the incentives that natural resource users face, and therefore their decisions about resource use. The indirect effects of conservation interventions on biodiversity, modulated through human decision-making, are poorly studied but are likely to be significant and potentially counterintuitive. This is particularly so where people are dependent on multiple natural resources for their livelihoods, when both poverty and biodiversity loss are acute. An inter-disciplinary approach is required to quantify these interactions, with an understanding of human decision-making at its core; otherwise, predictions about the impacts of conservation policies may be highly misleading.

Theory in Social Psychology: Seeing the Forest and the Trees

2004 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaacov Trope
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Social Judgment ◽  
Judgment And Decision Making ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Psychological Theories

The phenomena social psychology seeks to explain–how people think, feel, and act in response to social situations–are rich and diverse. Therefore, explanatory power, the simplicity of a model relative to its empirical scope, is an important desideratum for social psychological theories. A model achieves high explanatory power to the extent that it integrates narrower models within a unified conceptualization, reconciles conflicting findings, and makes novel predictions regarding specific phenomena. This article first relates explanatory power to the various facets of scientific inquiry (modeling, derivation, observation, evaluation, and decision) and then discusses this criterion as a guide for 2 theory-based lines of research my colleagues and I have conducted in the area of social judgment and decision making.

Attitude Formation and Attitude Change

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Supriya Srivastava ◽  
Kuldeep Chand Rojhe
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Attitude Change ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Attitude Formation ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Attitude Object ◽  
The Core

The study of attitudes formation and attitude change are two defining features at the core of social psychology. An attitude is a set of beliefs that people hold in relation to an attitude object, where an attitude object is a person, a product, or a social group. Since attitudes have been a strong influence on human behavior, social psychologists have viewed attitudes as important to understand behavior of individuals. Firstly, the chapter will introduce the concept of attitude with social psychological perspective. Attitude formation is important to understand to know why people hold different attitudes and how attitudes help to predict their behavior. In the second section, distinct ways of attitudes formation are discussed. It is also important to understand how attitudes influence in decision making, which is also discussed in the next section of the chapter. In the later section, changing processes of attitudes have been discussed.

scholarly journals Using Deep Learning to Predict Human Decisions, and Cognitive Models to Explain Deep Learning Models

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matan Fintz ◽  
Margarita Osadchy ◽  
Uri Hertz
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
Deep Neural Networks ◽  
High Capacity ◽  
Cognitive Models ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Human Decision ◽  
High Level

AbstractDeep neural networks (DNN) models have the potential to provide new insights in the study of human decision making, due to their high capacity and data-driven design. While these models may be able to go beyond theory-driven models in predicting human behaviour, their opaque nature limits their ability to explain how an operation is carried out. This explainability problem remains unresolved. Here we demonstrate the use of a DNN model as an exploratory tool to identify predictable and consistent human behaviour in value-based decision making beyond the scope of theory-driven models. We then propose using theory-driven models to characterise the operation of the DNN model. We trained a DNN model to predict human decisions in a four-armed bandit task. We found that this model was more accurate than a reinforcement-learning reward-oriented model geared towards choosing the most rewarding option. This disparity in accuracy was more pronounced during times when the expected reward from all options was similar, i.e., no unambiguous good option. To investigate this disparity, we introduced a reward-oblivious model, which was trained to predict human decisions without information about the rewards obtained from each option. This model captured decision-sequence patterns made by participants (e.g., a-b-c-d). In a series of experimental offline simulations of all models we found that the general model was in line with a reward-oriented model’s predictions when one option was clearly better than the others.However, when options’ expected rewards were similar to each other, it was in-line with the reward-oblivious model’s pattern completion predictions. These results indicate the contribution of predictable but task-irrelevant decision patterns to human decisions, especially when task-relevant choices are not immediately apparent. Importantly, we demonstrate how theory-driven cognitive models can be used to characterise the operation of DNNs, making them a useful explanatory tool in scientific investigation.Author SummaryDeep neural networks (DNN) models are an extremely useful tool across multiple domains, and specifically for performing tasks that mimic and predict human behaviour. However, due to their opaque nature and high level of complexity, their ability to explain human behaviour is limited. Here we used DNN models to uncover hitherto overlooked aspects of human decision making, i.e., their reliance on predictable patterns for exploration. For this purpose, we trained a DNN model to predict human choices in a decision-making task. We then characterised this data-driven model using explicit, theory-driven cognitive models, in a set of offline experimental simulations. This relationship between explicit and data-driven approaches, where high-capacity models are used to explore beyond the scope of established models and theory-driven models are used to explain and characterise these new grounds, make DNN models a powerful scientific tool.

Listening Fast and Slow

2021 ◽  
pp. 172-188
Author(s):  
Graham Bodie ◽  
Susanne M. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Information Processing ◽  
Communication Theory ◽  
Dual Process ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Passive Mode ◽  
Process Framework ◽  
Human Decision ◽  
Listening Process

Like other constructs studied by communication scientists, listening has been viewed as a predominantly deliberate process that requires considerable cognitive resources to perform well. Listening, contrasted with hearing as a more passive mode of information processing, requires a person to actively receive, process, and sensibly respond to aural information. The emphasis on deliberate processing might perhaps have been fueled by research in social psychology, from which much communication theory is drawn. That literature has emphasized rational, deliberate processing at the expense of a more intuitive mode that tends to be viewed as inferior in human decision making and grounded much more in emotions. Using a general dual-process framework, the authors argue that an intuitive, experiential system plays a much more important role in the listening process than previously recognized. They lay out their rationale and model for experiential listening and discuss ways in which people can improve their intuitive listening through mindfulness-based metacognitive practices.

scholarly journals Presenting LusoLit: A lithotheque of knappable raw materials from central and southern Portugal

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Telmo Pereira ◽  
Anne Farias ◽  
Eduardo Paixão
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Human Decision ◽  
Southern Portugal

The knowledge of where past human populations collected their raw materials to produce stone-tools is crucial to understand subjects such as their territoriality, mobility, decision-making, range of acquisition, networks and, eventually, to infer their cognitive abilities and the adaptations to new environments, landscapes and territories. Therefore, the creation of lithic reference collections (lithotheque) is of utmost importance.In geological terms, Portugal is a highly complex and diversified region, with a plethora of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks dated from Proterozoic to present days. Such diversity might have influenced considerably the human decision-making on the choices of raw material and it might be one of the major reasons for the diversity seen throughout the diachrony of its archaeological record. Thus, sampling, cataloguing and mapping the raw material diversity in a territory with such variability allows to enrich the knowledge about it and, consequently to build stronger inferences about past human behaviour with more detail and less bias.In order to help the archaeological and anthropological research to better understand such archaeological record and past human behaviour in this territory, we started a reference collection for this region host in the University of Algarve: the LusoLit. Though in its early stages, this collection has already several hundred chert samples from Central and Southern Portugal. In this early stage, the raw material that we start collecting was chert because it is the least ubiquitous through the landscape and, consequently, that can provide better information. 

On Social Psychological Handy Work: An Interpretive Review of The Handbook of Social Psychology, Second Edition

1977 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 1109-1120
Author(s):  
Richard M. Merelman
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Cognitive Theory ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Leadership Behavior ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Selective Perception ◽  
Social Psychological Research

This paper reviews the new Handbook of Social Psychology, with a special eye towards its utility for political scientists. The review focuses on theory, methodology, substantive areas of social psychological research, and political applications of social psychological findings. Special attention is paid to Handbook articles of particular merit and application to political science. These include articles on cognitive theory, experimentation, observational analyses and sociometry, as well as articles which add to our knowledge of such politically important problems as reasoning, compliance, and decision making. Throughout, important findings relevant to the operations of politics are spotlighted. These include, inter alia, cognitive biases towards the perception of unequal influence, the “risky shift,” constraints on selective perception, and characteristics of leadership behavior. Omissions, theoretical flaws, and errors due to the “datedness” of findings are also discussed.

Evaluating Human Decision-Making Theories With Monkey Data

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott D. Brown ◽  
Pete Cassey ◽  
Andrew Heathcote ◽  
Roger Ratcliff
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Human Decision

History among the Junipers: Hosea 14:2–10 as Metahistoriography

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-116
Author(s):  
Mark W. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Moral Formation ◽  
Divine Agency ◽  
Human Decision

Abstract The dual endings of Hosea promoted reflection on Israel’s history as the movement from destruction to restoration based on Yhwh’s gracious decision for Israel. It thus clarifies the endings of the prior sections of the book (chs. 3 and 11) by locating Israel’s future in the realm of Yhwh’s activities. The final ending (14:10) balances the theme of divine agency in 14:2–9 with the recognition of human decision-making and moral formation as aspects of history as well. The endings of Hosea thus offer a good example of metahistoriography, a text that uses non-historiographic techniques to speak of the movements of history.

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