THE NOTION OF SPONTANEOUS CONSUMPTION

When approaching the consumption of resources issue there has been a tendency to focus our research and education efforts on encouraging thoughtful consumption. We ask people to examine their needs with care and then to mindfully match them to a product. The prototype for such behavior is the use of the various consumer magazines and green guides before making any purchase.

It might be hard to imagine a problem with encouraging thoughtful consumption. But such intense examination consumes enormous amounts of our finite mental attention. As the scholar Herbert Simon suggested, there is far more information available to us than we can ever hope to attend to. It is possible for people to be hopelessly overwhelmed by information which can be contradictory and trivial. Thus we might expect negative outcomes if people became meticulousness and calculating about every single act of consumption.

Now it is sometimes wise to "look before we leap." But there also are times when we should be responsive to ever-changing situations and opportunities. There are times when "he who hesitates is lost." And there are other times when it just doesn't matter.

Whether one takes an evolutionary perspective, or pursues a simple efficiency goal, it seems that some acts of consumption are not worthy of our intense scrutiny. There may well be times when instinctive, unpremeditated decision-making is not merely acceptable but in fact an adaptive response to a potentially overwhelming and uncertain situation. So while a quick analysis might suggest that the choice is between the opposites of thoughtful consumption and thoughtless consumption, in fact, this behavioral space is much larger. Included here is the notion of spontaneity.

We have all experienced situations when it seems natural if not downright pleasurable to be spontaneous. Some of you may have walked around a downtown and, without great planfulness, found yourself buying coffee or tea or gifts. Such impulsive buying is not uncommon in food stores, gardening stores, or tool store. While we've given impulsive buying a bad name we must acknowledge that such behavior is often associated with genuine satisfaction.

If, as is being suggested, spontaneous consumption were found to be both adaptive and satisfying then it might be the sort of inherited inclination we would have extreme difficulty in fully repressing. In such a situation the challenge for us would be to figure out how to work with this human inclination. One solution is to learn when such behavior is okay, environmentally and socially benign. We might help people to know when they must be careful and meticulous in their consumption and when they might safely be spontaneous. Framed this way the issue is one of competence; people need the procedural skills to know when it’s okay to ease up on their green enthusiasm.

It might prove useful to encourage people to explore this issue using what is called the small experiment method These are not official, traditional research studies but approximations. They are tentative, even modest efforts that include the strengths of formal research (e.g., evaluation, communication) without all of the fanfare. A small experiment approach to spontaneity might include three steps:

1. First, we might create environmental education programs in high schools or elsewhere that get some people to simulate spontaneous decision and others to use meticulousness decision-making.
   
   
2. Next, we might ask them to evaluate the consequences of their decision. Two categories of consequences in particular should be tracked. One relates to the products consumed. Here we can draw on the work from industrial ecology where life cycle analysis is accumulating enormous volumes of research on the environmental impacts of different product choices. The second relates to the psychological outcomes (e.g., mental fatigue from computationally-rich calculations, sense of well-being from product consumption or avoidance, joy of spontaneous consumption).
   
   
3. Finally, participants could compare notes with others, the result being a map of the territory – identification of those domains of consumption where spontaneous behavior is acceptable, even possibly more reasonable than a hyper-rational decision-making approach.

Copyright © 2009 Raymond De Young. All rights reserved.

FROM:  THE LOCALIZATION PAPERS

Raymond De Young, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Environmental Psychology and Planning
School of Natural Resources and Environment
Univeristy of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1041

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rdeyoung [at] umich [dot] edu

File updated: November 2, 2009