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- Holmgren, Mattias, Doktorand, 1991-, et al.
(författare)
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Eliminating the Negative Footprint Illusion by Fostering a Summative Mindset using a Transfer Paradigm
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- People’s belief that an environmentally friendly item that is added to a set of conventional items has the ability to reduce the total environmental impact of these items could lead to unwanted environmental consequences. An averaging bias seems to underpin this negative footprint illusion: people make their estimates based on the average of the environmental impact produced by the items rather than their accumulative sum. We report a study using a problem-solving transfer paradigm to explore if this preoccupation to think in terms of an average can be eliminated by fostering a summative mindset. The results demonstrate that, participants can correctly estimate that environmental impact will increase when a “green” car is added to a set of petrol cars, but only when this task is preceded by a task that engenders a summation judgment. Our evidence indicates that the negative footprint illusion can be tempered by problem-solving transfer whereby a primed concept (summation) is used adaptively on subsequent judgments, thereby correcting for bias in environmental judgments.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Holmgren, Mattias, Doktorand, 1991-
(författare)
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A Negative Footprint Illusion in Environmental Impact Estimates
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A major part of anthropogenic climate change is due to everyday human behavior, such as transportation, food and energy consumption. As a result, it has been argued that many barriers for mitigating climate change are psychological in nature. For example, people’s decisions and behaviors are subject to heuristics and biases which sometime harm our decisions. The benchmark of the present thesis is the finding that people believe that adding environmentally friendly items to a set of conventional items reduces the impact of the whole set. This phenomenon has been coined a negative footprint illusion (NFI). How robust is this effect, is it generalizable across judgmental dimensions and what is the mechanism that underpins the effect? This thesis concerns these three questions. Paper 1 found support for the assumption that an averaging bias underpins the NFI. On this view, the NFI appears because people intuitively respond with the average of the ‘vices’ (the unfriendly objects) and ‘virtues’ (the more environmentally friendly objects) in the combined set of objects. Paper 2 demonstrated that the NFI is insensitive to some levels of expertise. Furthermore, Paper 2 also reported the first demonstration of the NFI in the context of a within-participants design. Paper 3 found that a NFI can also be demonstrated in the context of atmospheric CO2 concentration estimates. Paper 3 also reported further evidence for the averaging bias account of the NFI and showed that the effect is at least insensitive to some variations in the framing of the problem posed to the participants. Paper 4 demonstrated that the NFI can be eliminated by priming a summative mindset before requesting participants to make the environmental impact estimates. Taken together, this thesis shows that the NFI is a robust phenomenon that can be found across various to-be-estimated stimulus materials, it appears to be underpinned by an averaging bias but can be cognitively controlled in certain conditions.
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| 4. |
- Holmgren, Mattias, Doktorand, 1991-, et al.
(författare)
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Deceptive sustainability : Cognitive bias in people's judgment of the benefits of CO2 emission cuts
- 2019
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Ingår i: Journal of Environmental Psychology. - : Elsevier. - 0272-4944 .- 1522-9610. ; 64, s. 48-55
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- People's beliefs in the actions necessary to reduce anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are important to public policy acceptability. The current paper addressed beliefs concerning how periods of small emission cuts contribute to the total CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, by asking participants to rate the atmospheric CO2 concentration for various time periods and emission rates. The participants thought that a time period with higher emission rates combined with a period of lower emission rates generates less atmospheric CO2 in total, compared to the period with high emission rates alone – demonstrating a negative footprint illusion (Study 1). The participants appeared to base their CO2 estimates on the average, rather than on the accumulated sum, of the two periods' emissions – i.e. an averaging bias (Study 2). Moreover, the effect was robust to the wordings of the problem presented to the participants (Study 3). Together, these studies suggest that the averaging bias makes people exaggerate the benefits of small emission cuts. The averaging bias could make people willing to accept policies that reduce emission rates although insufficiently to alleviate global warming.
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| 5. |
- Holmgren, Mattias, Doktorand, 1991-, et al.
(författare)
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When A+B < A : Cognitive bias in experts' judgment of environmental impact
- 2018
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Psychology. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 1664-1078. ; 9
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- When ‘environmentally friendly’ items are added to a set of conventional items, people report that the total set will have a lower environmental impact even though the actual impact increases. One hypothesis is that this “negative footprint illusion” arises because people, who are susceptible to the illusion, lack necessary knowledge of the item’s actual environmental impact, perhaps coupled with a lack of mathematical skills. The study reported here addressed this hypothesis by recruiting participants (‘experts’) from a master’s program in energy systems, who thus have bachelor degrees in energy-related fields including academic training in mathematics. They were asked to estimate the number of trees needed to compensate for the environmental burden of two sets of buildings: One set of 150 buildings with conventional energy ratings and one set including the same 150 buildings but also 50 ‘green’ (energy-efficient) buildings. The experts reported that less trees were needed to compensate for the set with 150 conventional and 50 ‘green’ buildings compared to the set with only the 150 conventional buildings. This negative footprint illusion was as large in magnitude for the experts as it was for a group of novices without academic training in energy-related fields. We conclude that people are not immune to the negative footprint illusion even when they have the knowledge necessary to make accurate judgments.
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| 6. |
- MacCutcheon, Douglas, et al.
(författare)
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Assuming the best : Individual differences in compensatory “green” beliefs predict susceptibility to the negative footprint illusion
- 2020
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Ingår i: Sustainability. - : MDPI. - 2071-1050. ; 12:8
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Recent years have seen a marked increase in carbon emissions despite pledges made by the international community at the Paris Accord in 2015 to reduce fossil fuel production and consumption. Rebound effects could contribute to this phenomenon as, in which attempts to curb carbon emissions might have inadvertently led to an upswing in fossil fuel usage. The present study hypothesizes that rebound effects are driven by a misapplication of compensatory balancing heuristics, with the unintended outcome of producing inaccurate estimates of the environmental impact of “green” or environmentally friendly labelled products or behaviors. The present study therefore aims to investigate the relationship between participants’ degree of compensatory thinking (e.g., “Recycling compensates for driving a car”) and their susceptibility to the Negative Footprint Illusion, a widely replicated phenomenon demonstrating that the presence of “green” products biases carbon footprint estimations. One hundred and twelve participants were asked to complete a 15-item Compensatory Green Beliefs scale and to estimate the total carbon footprint of a set of 15 conventional houses, followed by a set that included 15 “green” houses in addition to 15 conventional houses. Results indicated that participants, on average, believed that the "green" houses were carbon neutral, and that susceptibility to the Negative Footprint Illusion was predicted by performance on the Compensatory Green Beliefs scale. This is the first study confirming that individual differences in cognitive processes (i.e., Compensatory Green Beliefs) are indeed related to inaccurate estimates of “green” products, providing a foundation for further investigation of the influence of “green” and compensatory beliefs on carbon footprint estimates.
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