Page 89 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

72 L. Kruse

The invisibility and remoteness from experience of many environmental
problems, as well as the inability to perceive correlations between cause and effect,
has a number of psychological consequences:

• Where immediate experience is missing it is replaced by indirect experience.
On one hand, individuals seek a better understanding through interpersonal com-
munication, which offers social support, especially in cases where the ‘reality’
cannot be tested. On the other, the mass media assume significant relevance as they
transform unnoticeable and abstract facts into images and computer simulations, as
they use language to frame problems, thus making them comprehensible. The
media thus have a specific role in the social construction of global environmental
change. Furthermore, controversial expert debates in the media deserve special
mention as they produce ‘second-hand non-experience’ for the public (Beck 1992).
• In order to make conspicuous and incomprehensible phenomena understandable,
individuals will attempt to find a cause, even if a monocausal explanation does not
do justice to the complex circumstances, such as the process of climate change
(e.g. an accumulation of extreme weather events is seen as a consequence of cli-
mate change). Other cognitive strategies that are often regarded as leading to
‘errors’ in human information processing, but should rather be taken as ‘rules of
thumb’, are the so-called judgmental heuristics. These simplify complex problem-
solving processes, but are mostly used in an unreflected fashion (Kahneman et al.
1982). Such judgmental heuristics focus on, for example, the ‘representativeness’
of information, or cognitive ‘availability’ or ‘framing’ the specific presentation of
facts. The importance of events that may indeed occur incidentally, like a very hot
summer or a surprisingly long winter, may thus be overestimated and taken as an
indicator for global warming (representativeness heuristics). The significance if
novel or spectacular, picturesque and impressive incidents with great media cover-
age (dying seals or bird flu) will also be overestimated (availability heuristics).
Research on cognitive strategies and ‘biased’ findings are of special importance
when applied to the appraisal, communication and acceptance of risks.
Moving toward sustainability involves transforming non-sustainable behaviour
in many areas of everyday life, such as food consumption or recreational mobility.
Ultimately it is all about complex processes of ‘un-learning’ non-sustainable behaviour
patterns and adopting more sustainable ones or, more comprehensively, lifestyles.
It also includes the acquisition of decision-making and action-taking competencies
that take into account the three dimensions of sustainability, i.e. the environmental,
economic and social (Kaufmann-Hayoz and Gutscher 2001). An important condi-
tion for this is knowledge about the conceptual foundations, methodologies and
instruments of strategies for behavioural change.

The Gap Between Environmental Awareness and Action

In the public, but also in many political discussions, there is a widespread belief
that an increase in knowledge and/or strengthening of attitudes will lead – almost
automatically – to more sustainable behaviour. As a central instrument, communication