Psychologists Can Do Much to Support Sustainable Development 1Authors' names in alphabetical order. E-mail schmuck@gp.tu-berlin.de and C.A.J.Vlek@ppsw.rug.nl.

Abstract

With our biosphere steadily degrading, a solid psychological perspective on environmental, social, and economic (un)sustainability is urgently needed. This should supplement and strengthen biological, technological, and economic perspectives. After discussing positivistic and constructive psychology, we summarize major environmental problems with their social and economic implications. We also compose some essential psychological reasoning about them, including the commons dilemma model, different behavioral processes and strategies of behavior change, and various aspects of human quality of life (QoL). Psychologists can help analyze and mitigate the biggest sustainability problems: population growth, resource-intensive consumption, and harmful technologies—if their research is well-tuned to other environmental sciences, if the incentive structure for this work is improved, and if more attention is paid to the collective side of human behavior.