“Can’t you see that we are in trouble?” Cover Image

„Nem látod, hogy bajban vagyunk?”
“Can’t you see that we are in trouble?”

The environmental protection-related ignorance, its appearance in visual attentional patterns, and some possible explanation/interpretation

Author(s): Célia Krisztina Farkas, Péter Pajkossy, Andrea Dúll
Subject(s): Social Sciences
Published by: Debreceni Egyetem Politikatudományi és Szociológiai Intézet
Keywords: environmental crisis; environmental psychology; visual attention; attentional bias; ignorance; selfish genes

Summary/Abstract: The environmental crisis is an outstanding topic nowadays. Given that it is basically caused by human activity, this issue is worth examining at all levels of society. The present study investigated the individuals’ visual attentional patterns and the possible attentional biases related to pictures displaying environmental problems, in comparison to undisturbed nature and social scenes as control stimuli, within the framework of a reaction-time task. Changes in participants’ mood and their self-reported environmental awareness were also measured. However, only the negative social scenes resulted attentional bias, the environmental topics were not able to do that. Albeit the mood of the participants deteriorated during the experiment, it did not have any correlation with any other variables, and either did the environmental awareness. We displayed the stimuli during the task only for a short period of time, thereby we targeted to reach automatic attentional responses. Our results reflect to the fact, that the topic of the environmental crisis is not suitable to do this. This phenomenon propounds the demand of explanations behind this phenomenon (like the possible evolutionary background).

  • Issue Year: 11/2022
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 49-69
  • Page Count: 21
  • Language: Hungarian