Dass wir alle in einer gemeinsamen Wirklichkeit leben, setzen wir meist unhinterfragt voraus. Sehen Andere die Welt dann doch einmal anders, mag es uns scheinen, als sähen sie diese einfach nicht so, wie sie wirklich ist. Schwerer fällt uns anzuerkennen, dass andere zuweilen in ganz anderen Wirklichkeiten unterwegs sind als wir selbst. - Tom Poljansek zeigt, wie sich die Vorstellung einer Pluralität menschlicher Wirklichkeiten mit der Annahme einer wahrnehmungsunabhängigen Realität vereinbaren lässt, ohne sich in einen Relativismus der vielen Wirklichkeiten zu (...) verlaufen. In Auseinandersetzung mit »kontinentalen« und »analytischen« Ansätzen legt er eine elegante Theorie menschlicher Wirklichkeiten vor, die konstruktivistische und realistische, phänomenologische und naturalistische Motive unerwartet miteinander verbindet. (shrink)

This transdisciplinary doctoral thesis presents various theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches that together form an ecological approach to the study of social sciences. The key argument follows: to understand how sustainable behaviours and cultures may emerge, and how their development can be facilitated, we must further learn how behaviours emerge as a function of the person and the material and social environment. Furthermore, in this thesis the sustainability crises are framed as sustain-ability crises. We must better equip our cultures with (...) abilities to deal with the complexity and uncertainty of socio-ecological systems, and use these cultural skillsets to survive in and adapt to an increasingly unpredictable world. This thesis employs a plurality of ecological social sciences and related methodologies—such as ecological psychology, ecological rationality and agent-based modelling—to enlighten the question of how the collective adoption of sustainable behaviours can be leveraged, particularly by changing the affordances in the material environment. What is common to these ecological approaches is the appreciation of ‘processes’ over ‘products’: we must understand the various processes through which sustainable forms of behaviour or decision-making emerge to truly locate leverage points in social systems. Finally, this thesis deals extensively with uncertainty in complex systems. It proposes that we can look to local and traditional knowledge in learning how to deal adaptively with uncertainty. (shrink)

This model explores consensus among agents in a population in terms of two properties. The first is a probability of belief change. This value indicates how likely agents are to change their mind in interactions. The other is the size of the agents audience: the proportion of the population the agent has access to at any given time. In all instances, the agents converge on a single belief, although the agents are arational. I argue that this generates a skeptical hypothesis: (...) any instance of purportedly rational consensus might just as well be a case of arational belief convergence. I also consider what the model tells us about increasing the likelihood that one agent’s belief is adopted by the rest. Agents are most likely to have their beliefs adopted by the entire population when their value for PBC is low relative to the rest of the population and their audience sizes are roughly three-quarters of the largest possible audience. I further explore the consequences of dogmatists to the population; individuals who refuse to change their mind end up polarizing the population. I conclude with reflections on the supposedly special character of rationality in belief-spread. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of uncertainty, scientific attention has focused primarily on probabilistic approaches, which predominantly rely on the assumption that uncertainty can be measured and expressed numerically. At the same time, the increasing amount of research from a range of areas including psychology, economics, and sociology testify that in the real world, people’s understanding of risky and uncertain situations cannot be satisfactorily explained in probabilistic and decision-theoretical terms. In this article, we offer a theoretical overview of an alternative approach to (...) uncertainty developed in the framework of the ecological rationality research program. We first trace the origins of the ecological approach to uncertainty in Simon’s bounded rationality and Brunswik’s lens model framework and then proceed by outlining a theoretical view of uncertainty that ensues from the ecological rationality approach. We argue that the ecological concept of uncertainty relies on a systemic view of uncertainty that features it as a property of the organism–environment system. We also show how simple heuristics can deal with unmeasurable uncertainty and in what cases ignoring probabilities emerges as a proper response to uncertainty. (shrink)