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87 comments on The Behavioral Aspects of Peak Oil: Basic Contingencies

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rdberg42 on June 19, 2007 - 11:06am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

In addition to the behavioral contingencies, there are cognitive barriers to the acceptance of an unpleasant idea such as peak oil. In 1957, Leon Festinger first wrote of cognitive dissonance. When a person holds two opposing ideas (unlimited growth=spending good for economy) vs (finite resources, problem imminent), individuals tend to resolve the conflict toward the proposition in which they are most invested.

That glazed look many TOD writers talk about when they try to educate others about peak oil is likely to be cognitive dissonance, which is most easily resolved by maintaining the beliefs upon which many have based their lives.

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Vintermann on June 20, 2007 - 8:19am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

If you can't beat them, classify them, as a blogger friend of mine said after some particularly frustrating debaters...

This isn't particularly profound. This habit of explaining away other's reactions we've seen a lot of times: communists explaining people as products of the bourgeouis system, feminists explaining opponents as either oppressive (if they are men) or brainwashed (if they are women), even intelligence psychologists decrying their opponents as dimwits... all in scientific-sounding, empty jargon.

Behaviorism may be good for designing cockpits, but tell me one time it has been of any use whatsoever in examining larger society in any meaningful fashion?

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PeakPlus on June 20, 2007 - 8:47am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Advertising

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PeakPlus on June 20, 2007 - 8:59am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Ok, I admit, maybe advertising is not "whatsoever [useful] in examining larger society in any meaningful fashion" in your definition. But it sure is useful for the successful advertisers.

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Vintermann on June 21, 2007 - 3:40am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

But how much behaviorism is there in there? I'm asking because I don't know. I've seen some useful behavioral papers about evaluation of early computer user interfaces, and I've heard (and can easily believe) that it was also successfully applied in human interface design in planes, cars, machines etc.

However, the behaviorist programme that humans can and should be understood solely in terms of input-output relationships - I've seen critics refer to as pseudoscience, and I understand the young Noam Chomsky first became famous for a devastating critique of it. Apparently the critique was fair, because it managed to convince a lot of psychologists to abandon it.

Philosophically, it may be a consistent position to see humans as some sort of reward-maximising machines, but my impression was that it was rejected as a framework for psychology. So about this attempt to apply it to peak oil, a wide social phenomenon, I'm sceptical (but I'm an engineer, not a psychologist).

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PeakPlus on June 21, 2007 - 7:12am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

[...]that humans can and should be understood solely in terms of input-output relationships ... to see humans as some sort of reward-maximising machines ... I'm sceptical

...as you should well be.

An individual human is a very complex "machine" - it does in no way function linearly. It is chaotic and responds often very "illogically", meaning non-linearly. That is why it is hard to found behaviorism as a "science". It - like politics, like sociology, like education, like psychology itself, and like advertising(!) and war-propaganda - is an Art. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

But like any "-ology", it helps to talk about it, for some things work "better" (more often) than others.

We can also ology about the reasons why it didn't work, like Dr. Grant is doing.

p.s. Am neither an engineer nor a psychologist (rather a trained historian):
But I love models, which are in themselves imperfect ways of predicting outcomes for complex systems.

Cheers, Dom

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b3NDZ3La on June 20, 2007 - 9:38am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Actually, I think not.

Bernaise (Freud's nephew & advertising god) simply took the techniques of war propaganda and applied it to products.

voila.

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PeakPlus on June 20, 2007 - 10:09am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Well, thank you for proving my point.

Obviously it wasn't used for the "good", but it was used.

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