Please join the Center for Political Economy's Political Economy of Climate Lab on Wednesday, April 15 from 6:00-8:00 PM EST for a public lecture, It’s Not Easy Being Green: Understanding How and Why We Make Decisions that Impact the Environment with Elke U. Weber, Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University.
Everyday individuals, households, and organizations make many decisions that impact the environment in intentional or unintentional ways. Such decisions involve risk, uncertainty, long time-horizons, and distributed responsibility. This talk will examine the cognitive and motivational barriers that often prevent us from making such decisions wisely. Fortunately, there are some solutions. Those involve taking advantage of the ways in which people make decisions and acquire, represent, and process information that go beyond rational deliberation and choice. A better understanding of the abundance of goals that motivate people’s choices and of the multiple ways in which they arrive at their decisions provides entry points to the design of decision environments that help people, households, and organizations make decisions with which they will be more satisfied in the long run.
