Mortality awareness and water decisions: a social psychological analysis of supply-management, demand-management and soft-path paradigms

ABSTRACT

The beliefs underlying the water supply-management, demand-management, and soft-path paradigms are examined. Two questions are considered. First, can social psychology’s insights on mortality salience help explain the desire to control water and the dominant water supply-management paradigm? Second, can those insights also help explain the limited progress of demand management and water soft paths? We propose that mortality salience helps explain why individuals and societies seek to control water supply and, by extension, deny their connection to nature and limit consciousness of physical vulnerability. We briefly consider the implications of this perspective for water research, advocacy and policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Decisions
• fear
• efficiency
• governance
• mortality salience
• water

Acknowledgements

We extend our thanks to the reviewers for their insightful observations and helpful suggestions as we revised the manuscript.

Notes

1. ‘Mortality salience’ is the technical term for mortality awareness; ‘salience’ and ‘awareness’ are used interchangeably throughout the article.

2. Space limitations preclude extensive citing of literature. However, a supplementary list of references has been prepared. It can be sent to anyone who requests it from the lead author.

3. Examples of symbolic hero projects include nation building and fostering nationalism, supporting sports teams, building monumental architecture, engaging in philanthropy, and participating in social movements. Literal projects include adopting a religious belief in heaven or in reincarnation.

4. We rely on a definition of culture derived from social psychology and the TMT literature: culture provides socially sanctioned roles, behaviour models and symbolic immortality projects (Pyszczynski et al., 2015). In this definition, culture is a general template that varies across time and space but is also independent of the natural environment. The disconnect from the environment, and the resources that a culture is dependent upon, differs from the better-recognized definitions of culture in the water literature; see for example Linton (2010) or Strang (2015).

5. For ease of explanation, our discussion of water paradigms focuses on the household sector, but similar conclusions apply to commercial, industrial, institutional and agricultural uses of water.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council’s Insight Development [430-2012-0264] and Connection [611-2014-0103] grants, with additional financial support from the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment and Waterloo International.