Elke Weber to give Girard Lecture at Scripps College February 16

Elke Weber, CRED co-director, will give the Girard Lecture in Psychology at Scripps College in Claremont, CA on February 16th. The lecture is titled “It’s not Easy Being Green: Understanding How and Why We Make Decisions that Impact the Environment” and will take place 7:30-9:00 PM in Balch Auditorium. More information is below and available here.

Talk description 

Every day individuals, households, and organizations make a large number of decisions that impact the environment in intentional or unintentional ways. Such decisions involve risk, uncertainty, long time-horizons, and distributed responsibility, and Weber will examine the cognitive and motivational barriers in place that often prevent us from making such decisions wisely. Fortunately there are some solutions. Those involve taking advantage of the ways in which people make decisions and to acquire, represent, and process information that go beyond rational deliberation and choice. A better understanding of the abundance of goals that motivate people’s choices and of the ways in which they arrive at their decisions provides entry points to the design of decision environments that help people, households, and organizations make decisions with which they will be more satisfied in the long run.

Girard Lectureship 

The Girard Lectureship was established by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph M. Girard in 1968, in memory of Marion Jane Girard, Mr. Girard’s Mother, for the purpose of annually bringing a distinguished personage in the field of psychology, psychiatry, or mental health to Scripps College to present a lecture or series of lectures in his or her field and to conduct seminars and discussion groups with students and faculty on the general subject matter of said lecture or lectures. It is intended that the ward of each annual Lectureship would result in the publication of a paper written by the designated Lecturer relating to the subject matter of his or her lecture and/or lectures.