Sewell David K, Rayner Peter J, Shank Daniel B, Guy Sophie, Lilburn Simon D, Saber Saam, Kashima Yoshihisa
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia.
PLoS One. 2017 Sep 7;12(9):e0184480. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184480. eCollection 2017.
Adopting successful climate change mitigation policies requires the public to choose how to balance the sometimes competing goals of managing CO2 emissions and achieving economic growth. It follows that collective action on climate change depends on members of the public to be knowledgeable of the causes and economic ramifications of climate change. The existing literature, however, shows that people often struggle to correctly reason about the fundamental accumulation dynamics that drive climate change. Previous research has focused on using analogy to improve people's reasoning about accumulation, which has been met with some success. However, these existing studies have neglected the role economic factors might play in shaping people's decisions in relation to climate change. Here, we introduce a novel iterated decision task in which people attempt to achieve a specific economic goal by interacting with a causal dynamic system in which human economic activities, CO2 emissions, and warming are all causally interrelated. We show that when the causal links between these factors are highlighted, people's ability to achieve the economic goal of the task is enhanced in a way that approaches optimal responding, and avoids dangerous levels of warming.
采用成功的气候变化缓解政策需要公众选择如何平衡管理二氧化碳排放和实现经济增长这两个有时相互冲突的目标。因此，关于气候变化的集体行动取决于公众成员了解气候变化的成因和经济影响。然而，现有文献表明，人们往往难以正确推断驱动气候变化的基本累积动态。先前的研究侧重于使用类比来改善人们对累积的推理，并且取得了一些成功。然而，这些现有研究忽略了经济因素在塑造人们与气候变化相关决策时可能发挥的作用。在此，我们引入了一种新颖的迭代决策任务，在该任务中，人们试图通过与一个因果动态系统相互作用来实现特定的经济目标，在这个系统中，人类经济活动、二氧化碳排放和气候变暖都存在因果关联。我们表明，当这些因素之间的因果联系被突出显示时，人们实现任务经济目标的能力会以接近最优响应的方式得到增强，并且避免危险的气候变暖水平。
