Psychology and the EnvironmentIn our world today, we face with a great amount of environmental issues. Global warming that is increasing Earth’s temperature, deforestation which is causing us to lose trees which means a decrease in carbon dioxide. Trash being dumped everywhere you see, step and breathe. Millions of acres of rainforest being cut down every year, people overpopulating the cities and not having enough room for more people. This list is infinite.
Water is a really big issue in our environment. People think that just because there’s an abundant amount of water, it isn’t going to run out and we should really worry about it. Truth is, if we keep on with our careless ways, sooner or later, we are not going to have enough water and we will then regret our inconsiderate behavior with water. In Cornell College, we noticed how water is not on top of the priority list. If anything, it’s at the bottom. Staff and faculty have other more important issues to attend to.
Psychology and the environmentPsychology has a lot of concepts that help understand why people act a certain way to environmental problems. It examines the interrelationship between environments and human behavior. Psychology recognizes the need to be problem-oriented, using, as need, theories and methods of related disciplines such as sociology, biology and physics. We as people have hopes of a happy life with our family and friends with a good career that pays good money and having good health. We hear the news about all the environmental issues that are going around us and we worry but we don’t seem to do anything about the matter. This is one of the psychological terms that will be going more into depth later on which is called diffusion of responsibility. There are different branches of psychology like there are other studies offered in Cornell College that also help with environmental issues. In Cornell, electricity and waste are a big issue but water
Ralph S. Wilson is also the Director of the National Center for Environmental Policy, and the author of a book on Social Responsibility. “Do we need another person?”
How do we work toward creating a positive relationship with our environments? In my book I look for ways to address the issues that affect the nature of social interaction. For example, we need to find ways to keep ourselves from becoming alienated. Instead of being a negative person we should be a positive person. It is this same desire for being, that drives most of our social interactions, that led me to write this book. I ask ourselves what I am doing, what is the goal? I want to be myself, that is the only way I am. That is part of my mission to help people achieve their goals. I feel that the social issues in our society are not always positive, but they have all at least some value, and more than just the negative, but they have a much more positive value. We are not asking people to get on our own and go, “Oh, this is where we are supposed to be.” We want new people to become involved with our problems, we want to create a sense of community, and we want new relationships in the future. We want solutions, and in some ways even solutions that have nothing to do with our problems. You can always look around and see how you live. Now, one of the most important ways we have to engage with social problems is through self-awareness. We believe in being aware of our actions without looking into their consequences. But when we feel bad feeling bad, we tend to focus on the consequences of our behavior and get out of that. I want to help people who are already aware of their consequences to give them help. So, if you are an environmentalist working in the community, you should try to find a way to do this without looking into the negative. But sometimes you feel that you are on the wrong track. It’s easy to focus on the negative and make assumptions about the positive. People are aware that they are doing something positive, but some will act like that is what they are doing. As a result of our work in the field of social responsibility, it is possible some people have been misunderstood. I have also made contact with people who were unaware of their role in shaping how their friends and family see their lives or how they see their social interactions and then had that confused about what it was their role. I am thinking about trying to find relationships or work out how to balance roles of community and personal responsibility between those who view their life and their personal activities the way they see it and those who think that the public will perceive them when it comes to that kind of thinking.
The last sentence of this excerpt was inspired by a study on how people might work in situations where a lack of understanding of the negative may be problematic. In the study, participants were asked to fill out a survey about how they would view life to some extent. They were given a questionnaire about how they viewed their life and how well they did in certain aspects of it. Finally, they were asked who they thought the person in question would be because of her or them having negative opinions or experiences, and what those attitudes mean to them or their families. What they would think would be the person they thought that they would be like? They were then asked to indicate what attitudes to them they would want to have the most, the most positive attitudes, the most negative attitudes, and if these attitudes were not on the average person’s level. As you can see in the graph on the right, the people in the bottom group were slightly more supportive of the person in question than other people in the group. And one person got the most supportive of the person in question. The positive attitudes of those in the group was higher than that of the one in the middle group