New Ways to Promote Proenvironmental Behavior: Human Nature and Environmentally Responsible Behavior

This article constitutes a search for a people‐oriented approach to encouraging environmentally responsible behavior. It attempts to provide a source of motivations, reduce the corrosive sense of helplessness, and generatesolutions to environmental problems that do not undermine the quality of life of the people who are affected. The altruism‐centered approach currently popular in the academic literature, by contrast, is seen as contributing to helplessness and focusing on sacrifice rather than quality‐of‐life‐enhancing solutions. An alternative, the Reasonable Person Model, offers an evolutionary/cognitive/motivational approach to understanding human nature.