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.

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