RESEARCH

How is societal complexity changing human cultural evolution?  Changes in the structural complexity of society are changing the dynamics of our culture, from the discovery or derivation or information about the world (e.g. by natural science), through communication (e.g. the 'media'), reception (e.g. psychology and sociology), individual awareness and concern (e.g. ethics), behavioural limits (e.g. economics and policy), and eventually to changes in individual and societal behaviour.  I am interested in understanding how changes in these cultural processes are influenced by changes in the structure of society.

One tack I am taking to explore this question is to understand the role of informational feedbacks in human decision-making.  Specifically, if we look at historical cases where societies have ‘collapsed’ (e.g. the Mayan, Easter Island, and Roman civilizations), can we detect any commonalities in the relationship between these societies and their natural resources?  Were there tight connections between the status of their resources and their behaviour regarding those resources?  The Easter Islanders, for example, must have been fully aware of the declining populations of tress on the island and the potentially disastrous consequences of loss of trees from the island—so why did their behaviour not change?  I expect that much has to do with the evolution of elaborate and complex societal behaviours that eventually cause the disintegration or retardation of feedback cycles between humans and the natural environment that sustains them.  If true, how should this guide our behaviour as the most affluent and pervasive society in history?
Another approach is to address how people behave given exposure to different types of communication.  Psychological research done at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED) and elsewhere has demonstrated that emotional reactions have a stronger motivational impact than analytical reactions.  In other words, we are more likely to be stirred to action by a personal story or photographs of how the large fish are disappearing from our world’s oceans, rather than a statistical or scientific presentation of similar information.  This illustrates a potentially serious social problem.  Many of the most malignant environmental problems occur on temporal and spatial scales incongruous with scales of personal human experience; if personal experience does more for catalyzing care than does information, many environmental issues are unlikely to receive the necessary attention of individuals.  As Peter deMenocal states in his article After Tomorrow, “[…] addressing the problem of global warming is a platform perfectly ill-suited to election or re-election.” (Orion, Jan/Feb 2005).  I might go even further and state that a potential majority of environmental issues are, in fact, perfectly ill-suited to stimulate care in humans.  This, in turn, reiterates an important long-standing social challenge: how do we encourage people to pay attention?  And, more specifically for environmental issues, how do we prompt attention to topics that may not be intuitive or immediate concerns, yet have potentially massive chronic and pervasive impacts on our lives?
It is through the use of historical case studies, some explicitly coupled ecological-archaeological-anthropological-geological field research (the Sanak Island biocomplexity project), complex adaptive systems theory, and a fusion of social and life science conceptual approaches, that I hope to shed some light on these issues of catalyzing sustainability and care.