If you're concerned about climate change and the environment while others around you seem less so, might you able to chalk it up to a greater tendency to dwell in systems thinking?
Past research has highlighted that those who care about the environment tend to be “Open to Experience” — wanting to try out new things and new experiences — and also to have high levels of empathy, or sensitivity to the suffering of others (including not just humans, but plants and animals). New research, though, suggests there’s a more intellectual side to being green as well. In particular, it finds that those with a tendency to engage in what is called “systems thinking” — embracing complex, multifaceted causal explanations for phenomena and recognizing the unpredictability of how nature works — also tend to value the environment more and to be more concerned about climate change.
When it comes to the role of systems thinking in environmentalism, “the idea is that it’s encouraging people to think about longer chains of causality, nuanced aspects of a complex system, and how any behavior in that system can have both intended and unintended consequences, and those can be hard to predict,” said Oberlin College psychologist Paul Thibodeau, author of a new study on the matter just published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, and co-authored with his colleague Stephen Lezak.
The good news is that "systems thinking" can, of course, be taught. And this may hint at better and worse methods for making the environmental case even in our hyperpoliticized environment.
For instance, the study suggests that describing a natural park as a beautiful “pearl” may not put people in a systems-oriented mind-set, whereas describing it as the “backbone” of a larger system might have that effect.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Immigration law is definitely Arizona's Prop 187:
The California GOP's embrace of the hateful Prop 187, which would've banned undocumented immigrants from all government services, including public education, continues to cost their party 16 years later. Since the initiative passed in 1994, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the only Republican, under bizarre conditions (the recall election), to win a governor, senator, or presidential race in the state. Democrats have dominated the rest of the statewide elected offices, with just a smattering of Republicans occasionally picking up the odd seat.
Now, California Latinos are a solid Democratic bloc, even though on social issues, they oftentimes line up more naturally with Republicans. In the Golden State, Barack Obama won 74 percent of the Latino vote, compared to just 23 percent for McCain.
In Arizona, Obama won 56 percent of Latinos, with McCain getting 41 percent. Of course, McCain was a native son, so perhaps that boosted his numbers? Nope. In the 2006 Senate race, wingnut Sen. Jon Kyl got the same41 percent of the Latino vote.
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: A #GunFAIL roundup. Greg Dworkin & Joan McCarter on the primaries, and the importance of down-ticket races. McDonnell hopes Citizens United will save him. And he might have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for that meddling Death.
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