3 months ago “Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behaviour,” says Merz. “For decades we’ve been telling people to change their behaviour without saying: ‘Change your behaviour.’ We’ve been saying ‘be more green’ or ‘fly less’, but meanwhile all of the things that drive behaviour have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction – and we’ve been wondering why nothing’s changing.”
The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signalling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviours which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one’s status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategiesto create behaviours incompatible with a sustainable world.
“People are the victims – we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction,” says the evolutionary behavioural ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. “Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?”
7 months ago Interesting #article💬 about the breakdown of our climate being due to a "behavioral crisis" driven by marketing. The accumulation of advertisers and counter-intelligence programs to confuse and persuade the populace for a variety of profit-motivated reasons have conspired to rob us of our better judgment and left the populace degenerating into consumerist addicts who cannot address large collective problems or have a cohesive narrative or conversation that won't be polluted by corporate interests.
“We’ve socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour.
70 months ago Facebook and other social media herd us into a Monoculture through positive reinforcement. Nothing new can ever be created artistically or politically if popularity is required to reach people.