Humans are information processors that can take current and
past experiences and make predictions about future situations and outcomes. Prospection is the ability to set plans
for future goals in the short, medium, and long term and to alter present
behaviors to achieve those goals. How people come to prospect can be explained
using the Reasonable Person Model.
This expansive framework works to reduce the processes of how humans interact
with the world into three intersecting categories; building models, being
effective, and taking action. Building models is the idea that we are
internally motivated to seek new information to construct a base of knowledge.
This base of knowledge helps us in taking action, as it allows us to estimate
the ways our participation can be personally rewarding and yield the best
results. Those results produce information that is absorbed through model
building and can guide the ways we take action in the future. But how efficiently
we build, act, and link the two depends on our ability to be effective. This is
our capacity to utilize our cognition and put our directed attention to good
use. Successful model building and restorative behaviors elevate our ability to
be effective, while failure and usage of directed attention can deplete it. It
is in these ways that the three spheres of the Reasonable Person Model feedback
into each other. When people can fulfill the Reasonable Person Model, it makes
it easier to prospect and achieve the goals one sets.
These two main themes can be used as a framework to
interpret the successes and stagnation of movements towards environmental
sustainability. Take the act of turning the lights off when you leave a room,
for example. Our mental models allow us to map locations of bulbs and switches
in a room when we enter and they are important for navigating rooms to leave
and turn switches off. It is easy to be effective in this task because the act
of flicking a switch as you walk by is not attentionally expensive. Lastly, the
act of turning lights off is a simple act, requires little motivation to act
out, and has virtually no cost compared to the reward. For these reasons, the
sustainable choice of turning non-essential light bulbs off fits successfully
into each sphere of the Reasonable Person Model. In terms of prospection, the convenient
locations of switches leave only a little amount of planning that needs to be
done to get to them. Because of how easily this sustainable behavior melds with
our psychology, it is clear why many people have adopted it.
Compare this to another, less practiced, sustainable behavior;
cutting red meat out of our diets. Most of us have cognitive maps that contain
the locations of all of the nearby hamburger shops. The smells, sights, and
sounds of cooking red meat can be involuntarily fascinating, meaning it takes a
lot of directed attention to turn focus away from them. Lastly, normalization
of meat eating in our culture makes it so eating vegetarian or vegan doesn’t
offer the same positive social feedback that being an omnivore does. That these
factors are positively associated meat eating means it requires a lot of effort
in attention, learning, and restricting behavior to change the way we, as
individuals eat. So even though it may be easy to prospect and create plans to
eat less red meat, the difficulty in realizing those goals can be partly
explain by the concept’s incongruence with the Reasonable Person Model.
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