Ronald Bailey on How Fear of Disorder Motivates Environmentalists
Why do people recycle and buy organic foods? According to Marijn Meijers and Bastiaan Rutjens, a couple of social scientists at the University of Amsterdam, they do it to realize a sense of personal control stemming from their fear that disorder is increasing in the world. Technological optimists, meanwhile, are more likely to eschew the comfort of such rituals. To be fair, that's not exactly how the two researchers interpret their study, which was published in the August European Journal of Social Psychology. But Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey argues that it is not unreasonable to construe their results that way.