Ideological dungeons and cognitive dragons

Behavioral sciences and their role in conceptualizing the climate crisis

Abstract

In recent years, several publications have emerged that attempt to generate a framework for the application of neurocognitive knowledge to solve social problems. Under the moniker of "behavioral sciences", this field of studies, which presents itself as profoundly interdisciplinary, aims to provide tools to solve various social problems by elucidating the mechanisms underlying human behavior and their subsequent operationalization in the form of public policies. We focus our attention on certain epistemological and ideological aspects that underlie these initiatives, in particular their conceptualization of the climate crisis as a problem to be solved through advances in the cognitive sciences. We observe, exemplify and problematize a series of premises: the behavior of the individual as the terminal expression of an "internal" process in which the environment and by extension the "social" are subordinated in terms of their explanatory hierarchy; the simplification of the problems to be solved in terms of cognitive biases and limitations, so that the objectives of the intervention are the behaviors and decisions of individual actors; the appeal to biology as explanatory support for the psychological constructs used through adaptationist narratives on the development of innate cognitive functionalities. We maintain that the generation and application of knowledge in this kind of initiatives is inscribed in a sharp ideological line, according to which the main causes of the climate crisis are not to be found in the dynamics and contradictions of the current socioeconomic system, but in those of individual cognitive systems.