Jeanne Brett - US grants

The PIs propose to examine the apparent discrepancy between the pro-environmental attitudes that people express and the less than pro-environmental behaviors that people perform. The PIs propose to perform four streams of experiments to examine this issue. In the first stream of experiments the PIs will examine preference reversals in environmental domains. The hypothesis is that when persons evaluate a single option, they tend to focus on what they want rather than what they think they should do. When choosing between two or more options, people switch their mode of decision making toward what they perceive they should do. In the second stream of experimentation, the PIs will explore the self-enhancement biases that allow people to escape blame from behaving in ways that are detrimental to the environment. In the third stream of studies the PIs will explore egocentrism in the arena of environmental decision making. By interpreting information in a self-serving manner, persons can act in an exploitative way toward the environment and toward each other and still feel that they have behaved appropriately. Finally the PIs will explore the area of generation discounting--the means by which people evaluate the relative importance of their current consumption relative to the welfare of subsequent generations.