CRED at AAAS

CRED directors and researchers will attend next week’s American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Boston.

This year’s AAAS meeting will be held at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, MA February 14-18, 2013. CRED Directors and researchers will attend the meeting and several students will participate in a poster session featuring the work of each center funded under the National Science Foundation’s “Decision Making Under Uncertainty” grant. Nada Petrovic (Post-doctoral fellow) and Lisa Zaval (PhD student) will present the poster “What’s in a frame when it comes to fossil fuels: Does health matter more than climate change?” and Matt Sisco (CRED Program Coordinator) will present the poster “Why do people care about sea lions? A fishing game to study the value of endangered species.” Please see abstracts below.

We hope to see you there!

“What’s in a frame when it comes to fossil fuels: Does health matter more than climate change?”

Nada Petrovic (Post-doctoral fellow) and Lisa Zaval (PhD student)

Abstract

In the US, the public consistently ranks climate change as a low national priority even though over half of  the population is convinced of the reality and seriousness of the problem.  These seemingly contradictory statements can be explained through a lack of personal engagement and a sense of spatial and temporal distance from the effects of climate change.  Yet, the chief method for climate change mitigation, the reduction of fossil fuel use, would also reduce air pollution, which is responsible each year for 0.8 million premature deaths and 6.4 million lost life years worldwide.  The health behavior literature demonstrates that personal perception of risk is one of the strongest motivators of behavioral change. The objective of this study was to understand whether emphasizing present-day public health impacts has a greater effect on beliefs/actions toward fossil fuel reduction than emphasizing climate change impacts.  A secondary aim
was to understand what other characteristics (demographic, political, religious, etc.) predict beliefs and actions.  We will present preliminary data that begins to answer these questions and discuss next steps in this project.

“Why do people care about sea lions? A fishing game to study the value of endangered species”

Matt Sisco (CRED Program Coordinator)

Co-authors: Min Gong, Altisource; and Geoffrey Heal, Columbia Business School

Abstract

Previous research proposes that human beings have various motivations to protect endangered species such as use and non-use values. However, it has been difficult to tease apart these values at the behavioral level. Using an innovative fishing game, we study an important tradeoff between one kind of use value (monetary value) and one kind of non-use value (existence value) of the endangered Steller sea lion. In the fishing game, players make repeated decisions on how much Pollock to harvest for profit in each period in a dynamic ecosystem. The population of the endangered sea lion depends on the population of Pollock, which in turn depends on the harvesting behavior of participants. The data show that in general people responded to the financial value, but not the existence value, of the sea lion by cutting down commercial fish harvesting to keep more sea lions in the ecosystem. However, not all people behaved the same regarding the existence value. Females displayed a higher existence value than males, as did people who reported stronger pro-environmental attitudes than those with weaker pro-environmental attitudes. Our findings have multiple implications for environmental advocacy campaigns and public policy design.