New Ways to Promote Proenvironmental Behavior: Human Nature and Environmentally Responsible Behavior

This article constitutes a search for a people-oriented approach to encouraging environmentally responsible behavior. It attempts to provide a source of motivations, reduce the corrosive sense of helplessness, and generatesolutions to environmental problems that do not undermine the quality of life of the people who are affected. The altruism-centered approach currently popular in the academic literature, by contrast, is seen as contributing to helplessness and focusing on sacrifice rather than quality-of-life-enhancing solutions. An alternative, the Reasonable Person Model, offers an evolutionary/cognitive/motivational approach to understanding human nature.