Remote or temporally distant harms fail to motivate because only vivid futures can

Evidence

In preserving the environment, people are motivated more by local problems, such as air and water pollution, health impairment, extreme weather events, and toxic waste, than by generalities about global harm. The lived experience of environmental degradation becomes part of people’s daily lives. Motivating people becomes more challenging when the environmental harm is cumulative, reaching crisis proportions only in some distant future. The future cannot be a cause of current behavior because it has no material existence. However, cognitive representation can bring visualized futures into the present as current guides and motivators of behavior. It is difficult to change behavior that is disjoined from its consequences in the here and now. It is a daunting challenge to do so when harmful consequence are slowly cumulative and go unnoticed over a long period. Aversive life conditions today are the consequences of behavioral practices by faceless generations long ago. It is easy to talk about a moral obligation to protect the quality of future life, but prevailing behavioral practices often undermine the realization of that very future. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2949

Categorization

• QUESTION: This claim that ‘the future cannot be a cause of current behavior’ is the analytical core of environmental moral disengagement; does other climate-psychology literature treat imagined futures the same way?
• XREF: Speaks to moral disengagement literature: temporal and spatial distancing as mechanisms that diffuse responsibility, contrasting proximity-driven motivation.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2949