Environmental behavior and fast and frugal heuristics

Abstract

An important prerequisite to encourage pro-environmental behavior is to understand how people make decisions. Specifically, humans are often confronted with an environment that exhibits considerable uncertainty due to limited time, information, and computational capacity. In such a context, Homo oeconomicus is not necessarily the benchmark by which to judge human actions. Instead, research on pro-environmental behavior should be based on a theory of bounded rationality that takes seriously and provides details on how people process different kinds of information. We review the work previously done on a number of simple, psychologically plausible decision strategies, or fast and frugal heuristics, that have been shown to perform well in an uncertain environment. We put special emphasis on showing under what conditions this holds and speculate on the bearing that fast and frugal heuristics might have on understanding and improving pro-environmental behavior.