ASPIRing to Mitigate Climate Change: Superordinate Identity in Global Climate Negotiations

The issues surrounding rising levels of atmospheric CO₂ and climate change have become part of the collective conscious and the vernacular of world leaders, media, and the public alike. Despite the widespread concern and attention, attempts to achieve a global commitment to mitigate climate change are failing. In this article, we suggest that the Actualizing Social and Personal Identity Resources model (ASPIRe; Haslam, Eggins, & Reynolds, 2003 ), developed to help organizations become more sustainable and productive, can promote more efficient negotiations in matters of global environmental concern. Using this model as a framework, the dynamics of the United Nations (UN) meeting in Copenhagen are scrutinized along with suggestions for how to structure future negotiations. Building on an understanding of existing UN‐type committee structures, it is argued that as the interests of individual nations and those of like‐minded other nations (subgroup interests) become the real basis for decision making on the issue of climate change the more likely it is that a higher‐order superordinate identity will emerge, which promotes aligned action. To date, the psychological aspects of social and behavioral change have been neglected, which could be a factor in explaining the lack of coordinated action on climate change.     

How Science Is Applied in Technology

Unlike basic sciences, scientific research in advanced technologies aims to explain, predict, and (mathematically) describe not phenomena in nature, but phenomena in technological artefacts, thereby producing knowledge that is utilized in technological design. This article first explains why the covering‐law view of applying science is inadequate for characterizing this research practice. Instead, the covering‐law approach and causal explanation are integrated in this practice. Ludwig Prandtl’s approach to concrete fluid flows is used as an example of scientific research in the engineering sciences. A methodology of distinguishing between regions in space and/or phases in time that show distinct physical behaviours is specific to this research practice. Accordingly, two types of models specific to the engineering sciences are introduced. The diagrammatic model represents the causal explanation of physical behaviour in distinct spatial regions or time phases; the nomo‐mathematical model represents the phenomenon in terms of a set of mathematically formulated laws.     

How to Characterise Pure and Applied Science

Regarding the dichotomy between applied science and pure science, there are two apparently paradoxical facts. First, they are distinguishable. Second, the outcomes of pure sciences (e.g. scientific theories and models) are applicable to producing the outcomes of applied sciences (e.g. technological artefacts) and vice versa. Addressing the functional roles of applied and pure science, i.e. to produce design representation and science representation, respectively, I propose a new characterisation of the dichotomy that explains these two facts.     

Public Engagement with Climate Change as Scientific Citizenship: A Case Study of World Wide Views on Global Warming

World Wide Views (WWViews) is an innovative participatory methodology that scales up formal public engagement in response to global environmental issues that transcend the boundaries of the nation-state. In September 2009, WWViews on Global Warming enrolled 4,400 lay participants from across 38 countries to discuss global climate policy. The most remarkable outcome was how consistently people from across different political regions and social groups called for a stringent global climate policy. Drawing on scientific citizenship as an analytic lens, this result is positioned, not as a straightforward input into global policy but as an output from a highly formalized process. What forms of citizenship are embodied, projected, and negotiated in WWViews? What are the implications of these tacit forms of citizenship for the types of epistemic agency that emerge as a result? WWViews participants were situated as consumers of scientific knowledge tasked with responding to a limited slate of policy options that they had no role in creating, vetting, or altering. WWViews also projected an image of the global citizen shorn of any meaningful geographical, cultural, or political particularity. Effectively tethering the epistemic capacities of its participants to dominant scientific meanings, WWViews offered limited opportunity for alternative issue-framings or perspectives to emerge. Organizers and researchers of formal public engagement should be attentive to the potential for these initiatives, once scaled up to the global, to impose scientistic issue-framings and correspondingly limited models of epistemic agency.     

Education as a Science

Developmental differences in recall were investigated as a function of mode of presentation (blocked vs. random), recall condition (cued vs. noncued), and time of recall (immediate vs. delayed). Ninety-six second graders and 96 fourth graders were the subjects, and the stimuli were 20 pictured items from five categories. Data on three dependent variables (item recall, category recall, and clustering score) were analyzed. Immediate recall was better than delayed recall, the fourth graders' overall performance was superior to that of the second graders, and the blocked presentation of items and the presence of retrieval cues at recall enhanced recall and organization in recall. Furthermore, an analysis of a three-way interaction on two dependent measures indicated that, in the noncued condition, immediate recall was better than delayed recall for children in both grades. However, in the cued condition, the fourth graders performed better during delayed recall than during immediate recall, whereas the second graders did better during immediate recall than during delayed recall.     

Science as Structured Imagination

This paper offers an analysis of scientific creativity based on theoretical models and experimental results of the cognitive sciences. Its core idea is that scientific creativity — like other forms of creativity — is structured and constrained by prior ontological expectations. Analogies provide scientists with a powerful epistemic tool to overcome these constraints. While current research on analogies in scientific understanding focuses on near analogies, where target and source domain are close, we argue that distant analogies — where target and source domain differ widely — are especially useful in periods of intense conceptual change. To argue this point, we discuss three case studies from the history of science: early physiologists like Harvey, early evolutionary biologists like Darwin, and recent theorists on the evolution of the human mind like Mithen.     

Community Psychology and Global Climate Change: Introduction to the Special Section

Global climate change is not just a distant environmental or future problem but a crisis that has a clear human face already causing the suffering of millions around the globe. It is an issue of high relevance for community psychologists and the communities we work with but has received little attention within the field of community psychology. This special section is intended to promote more thinking and dialogue on this important topic. Six articles are presented that feature both theoretical consideration and empirical research related to global climate change and related environmental issues.     

Scientists' Uncertainty and Disagreement about Global Climate Change: A Psychological Perspective

Since there are major gaps in scientific knowledge about the greenhouse effect, policy makers are forced to rely on scientists' judgments about the rate of climate change and its effects. It now appears that significant policy decisions will have to be made despite continuing uncertainty and disagreement among scientists. The best that policy makers can do is look for guidance in the best available expert judgment. But when the best experts express great uncertainty and disagree, as seems to be the case with the greenhouse effect, policy makers are unsure about how to proceed. Despite its importance, scientific judgment about the greenhouse effect has not been systematically studied. Psychological research on expert judgment and decision making provides theory, methods, and empirical results that can be used to study judgments based on uncertain and incomplete data and can help to explain the sources of expert uncertainty and disagreement regarding the greenhouse effect. Possible explanations are discussed.     

Interdisciplinarity as Hybrid Modeling

In this paper, I present a philosophical analysis of interdisciplinary scientific activities. I suggest that it is a fruitful approach to view interdisciplinarity in light of the recent literature on scientific representations. For this purpose I develop a meta-representational model in which interdisciplinarity is viewed in part as a process of integrating distinct scientific representational approaches. The analysis suggests that present methods for the evaluation of interdisciplinary projects places too much emphasis non-epistemic aspects of disciplinary integrations while more or less ignoring whether specific interdisciplinary collaborations puts us in a better, or worse, epistemic position. This leads to the conclusion that there are very good reasons for recommending a more cautious, systematic, and stringent approach to the development, evaluation, and execution of interdisciplinary science.