Question: does your job help the enviroment and others

Jono Bone answered on 16 Jun 2013:

Hi,

My job it self does not directly help the environment but understanding the questions I ask in my research could. I try to understand why and how humans cooperate with each other in situations where they could do better by cheating.These situations are known as social dilemmas. Climate change is one of the biggest environmental issues and is a social dilemma. For example, if every country in the world cooperated by stopping burning fossil fuels and planting more trees then we could probably stop climate change and everyone would benefit. But, every country on their own would benefit from cheating by burning fossil fuels and not spending money planting trees if the rest of the country were cooperating. This would result in lots of countries cheating and climate change continuing. If we can understand how best to get people or countries to cooperate then we could use policies to create these conditions , this could be used to tackle environmental issues like climate change.