Innovation vs Behavior GSSS 2010 Debate

Haytko, Dyana L.; and Matulich, Erica (2008). Green advertising and environmentally responsible consumer behaviors: linkages examined. Journal of Management and Marketing Research, 1: 5-14.

In facing the challenge of reducing human impacts on the environment, there are unfortunately few clear paths, many trade-offs, and no single strategy. Given these difficult choices, we will argue that promoting technological approaches to lower human impact provide a better chance of success than consumption-based strategies. While neither strategy will be sufficient to solve the challenge alone, the difficulties of social inertia, cognitive bias, and market forces mean that changing consumption patterns is unlikely to be a viable primary strategy for reducing impacts. In addition, we demonstrate important ways in which technological developments promise improved impacts in many spheres. The central problem with placing too much hope in reducing consumption as a means of lowering overall impact is that consumption patterns may simply be too stereotyped and fixed to respond to policy signals in meaningful ways. Attempting to change basic habits of billions of people will be difficult, to say the least. First, the investment would have to be truly massive to compete with the hundreds of billions of dollars in annual global advertising expenditure. In addition, the approach suffers from the problem of confirmation bias. This well established psychological principle demonstrates that people tend to seek out information that verifies prior opinions and to discount information challenging those opinions (Masnick and Zimmerman, 2009). This can mean that, as Haytko and Matulich (2008) suggest, environmental appeals may essentially be preaching to the converted. A second problem with lowered consumption is that, in an integrated global economy, it is likely to have bounce-back effects that can undermine the intentions of policy. Lowering consumption in the global North means lowering global prices, which increases the potential buying power of those in the South, where large populations can replace the consumption foregone in the North (Alcott, 2008). Finally, we would like to offer some hope by examining the potential of technologies to mitigate human impacts in the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere. GPS technologies are currently being employed to track and protect endangered species. Soil conservation is improved by the application of various bacteria and fungi. Earthships make some people self-sufficient in water. Most crucially for our current debate, however, energy efficiency technologies promise to play an important role in impact reduction. A 2007 United Nations Foundation report, for example estimated that a worldwide doubling of energy efficiency growth until 2030 and a taper to 1% growth by 2100 would be sufficient to stabilize carbon emissions at 550 ppm, not regarding other technological responses. The challenge of lowering human impacts on the environment presents no clear solutions. We have, however, argued that, on balance, technological approaches are likely to hold more promise than approaches emphasizing reducing consumption. Because of social inertia and market interdependencies, consumption-mitigation approaches are unlikely to produce tangible results. Technological approaches, while they cannot reduce human impacts to desired levels single-handedly, are therefore likely to be more effective as a central pillar of strategies to reduce human impacts.