Social desirability and behavioral changes at different spatial and temporal scales are crucial in the study of environmental questions: How to represent the complexity of these phenomena and assess their uncertainty to build a valid socio-ecological model?
Particularly in an agent-based model, how to take into account and represent social desirability and behavioral changes (unconscious or forced) within their decision-making process?
I believe that this is a very interesting and important question. To help me to think about it, please give an example of the type of environmental scenario you have in mind. For example would a dam building or pipe-line laying project be central to the scope of your question?
James Doran
Hi James, thanks for your response.
I was more thinking of a simple behavioral model that would represent human decision making such as, for example, purchase of organic food or the use of public transport.
Firstly, when conducting interviews there might be a bias linked to social desirability (other-deception bias but also self-deception bias which would occur kind of unconsciously). Different methods exist in order to overcome this issue (social desirability scale, indirect questioning, etc) but how could we represent this phenomenon in a socio-ecological model?
Also, if we want to model a socio-ecological system (let's say: consumers of organic food), how could we represent the changing of behavior through time? (because some people might shift their diet towards organic food for example) What method would be the best to get this kind of information?
In this case, is this more adapted to represent agents as individuals or as social groups? How to evaluate the uncertainty linked to these phenomena?
Thanks a lot for your interest.
Hi Camille!
Ok I see where you are coming from but I am still a bit puzzled as to what exactly you are after. Please explain for me how your "socio-ecological model" would be used in practice? Importantly, would/could it be a computer based model or do you intend that it should be specified verbally?
James
PS Trying to make it a wholly mathematical model would be, I suspect, altogether too difficult.
Hi James!
Actually, the model does not need to be developed mathematically or on computer, only described verbally. In fact, the goal here would be to develop a kind of conceptual framework that could help in taking into account social desirability and changing behavior when designing a socio-ecological model that could be used as a predictive model (by eventually taking a concrete example related to environmental behavior)
I found a lot of literature concerning induced changing behavior (through intervention, how to proceed to induce a behavioral change, etc) but I can't find any on the "natural/unconscious" behavioral change and how we can represent this phenomenon (methodologically speaking) within a model.
I don't know if that's clear... if not, you can send me a private message so we can speak about it more easily :)
Thanks again for your interest !
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