Excerpt
Soil and water conservation issues are landscape-level issues, yet the human mind is biased to focus on individual-level phenomenon. This mismatch of scale often hinders the adoption of behaviors necessary for effective soil and water protection.
The theory of grounded cognition claims that the human mind evolved to account for sensory input that directly led to bodily survival, and it is therefore optimized to comprehend ideas at this level (Kaschak and Maner 2009). Research suggests that as concepts deviate from this “human scale,” comprehension becomes skewed. Referencing group sizes that are closer to cohesive units in human society, such as a value out of 125, permit easier assessment and are less influenced by message framing than when referencing larger group sizes beyond normal human relationships, such as a value out of 100,000 (Garcia-Retamero and Galesic 2011; Wang 1996). Similarly, people predict concepts psychologically near to them in concrete terms, but perceptions become more abstract and less contextualized as the concept moves more distant in time or space (Trope et al. 2007). Even the perceptions of numbers themselves are not linear; the difference between values commonly encountered in daily life, such as between 10 and 20, is given more importance than…
- © 2012 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society