Sonja Geiger

Zeitnot ist ein weitverbreitetes gesellschaftliches Phänomen. Umfragen aus verschiedenen Ländern bestätigen dieses Bild: Viele Menschen leiden unter Zeitmangel und fühlen sich oft gehetzt (Deutschland: Statista 2021, Österreich: Statistik Aus-tria 2011, UK: Southerton 2003). Eine im Februar 2020 von den Autorinnen durchgeführte repräsentative Umfrage gestattet einen Einblick in den Status quo der zeitbezogenen Lebens-situation in Deutschland vor der Pandemie. Für die Umfrage wurden etwas mehr als 2.000 Menschen u. a. gefragt, wofür sie eine zusätzliche Stunde pro Tag verwenden würden. Das Stim-mungsbild, das sich beim Auszählen der Antworten ergab, zeigt v. a. drei Bereiche, in denen sich die Zeitnot manifestiert. Zum einen wurde das Bedürfnis nach Regeneration thematisiert: schlafen, ausruhen, entspannen und weitere Synonyme wie chillen oder relaxen wurden am häufigsten genannt. An nächster Stel-le wurden lesen, verschiedene Hobbys oder Sport genannt, also Freizeitbeschäftigungen, für die keine direkte Verwertungslo-gik gilt. Der dritte große Bereich, der in der Lebensgestaltung vor Corona offensichtlich zu kurz kam, sind soziale Beziehun-gen; so nannten die Befragten am dritthäufigsten die Begriffe Familie, Freund*innen, Kinder und Beziehung (Gerold und Geiger 2020)...

Recently, a number of Collaborative Fashion Consumption (CFC) initiatives have been established that offer consumers opportunities to use idling capacities of already existing clothes to fulfill their desires with less environmental and social impacts. CFC integrates the concept of sharing economy in the fashion industry. By participating in CFC, consumers have the opportunity to acquire clothing in innovative manners as an alternative to the classic purchase of new products. In CFC, consumers can share, rent, lease, swap, borrow, gift or buy second hand clothing. Using a mixed method research approach, the influence of different values (biospheric, altruistic, hedonic, egoistic) on the attitudes toward and the engagement in CFC is studied in this research. The results of this study show that egoistic values negatively influence attitude towards CFC, while biospheric values have a positive impact. Hedonic motives neither promote nor diminish attitudes towards CFC. For altruistic motives, the results of the qualitative and quantitative studies somewhat diverge. Whereas altruistic motives are found to play a small positive role in attitudes toward CFC in the survey data, such motives have not been mentioned in the qualitative study.

With their new campaign “I am made of water”, the work group on water of Amigos de la Tierra, Argentina (Friends of the Earth, Argentina) wants to call attention to the unjust and increasingly precarious drinking water situation in Argentina. This situation is characterized by great geographical, climatic and socio-economic differences between the dry and comparatively poor north and west of the country, on the one hand, and the humid, fertile Pampas and Buenos Aires region in the east, on the other. The basic climatic differences are intensified by differential effects of climate change on these regions. Additionally to this disparity in natural drinking water supplies, the national government employs a pricing and supply policy that favours the relatively rich, humid urban areas, while disadvantaging rural areas and the poor city fringes with low drinking water connectivity. The authors will follow up on how this unjust pricing system and lack of education have strengthened environment-damaging habits among the general public in those areas where water supply, at first glance, does not seem to be a problem. The role of cognitive factors, such as beliefs and (lack of) knowledge about water-related facts in creating and maintaining these unsustainable behaviours is discussed. Finally a threefold initiative for change is suggested, including personal education, strengthening social awareness and creating structural foundations as constitutional law warranty for access to water for fair prices.

Consider the following argument: “My keys are either in my pocket or on the shelf. Therefore, if my keys are not in my pocket, they are on the shelf ”. This argument sounds extremely compelling, but is it logically valid? For it to be logically valid, we would require that the conclusion (i.e., the conditional) follows necessarily from the premise (i.e., the disjunction) by virtue of its form, regardless of its content. Thus, for any propositions A and C, it cannot be the case that the premise “A or C” is true but the conclusion “if not A then C” is false. Whether or not the inference from a disjunction “A or C” to a corresponding conditional “if not A then C” is logically valid depends on how the conditional is understood.

In this chapter, we argue that the currently available evidence on how people interpret conditionals favors the probabilistic view, whereas evidence on how people reason with conditional premises supports the mental-model view. This motivated our search for a way to integrate the best parts of both approaches. The interpretation of conditionals in terms of conditional probabilities is incompatible with a truth-functional interpretation of conditionals. Therefore, we propose to give up the idea that the meaning of conditionals can be represented by the set of mental models that meet their truth conditions, or which are compatible with the conditional. Conditionals are not truth-functional, that is, they don't have truth conditions by which we can determine whether a given conditional is true or false simply from what is the case in a world. We believe that the core meaning of 'if p then q' is best expressed by a production that adds a representation of 'q' to every representation of 'p' in working memory. This production can be used in two ways when it comes to reason from conditionals. When the minor premise matches the conditions of application of the production (i.e., the antecedent of the conditional it represents), the conditional's consequent can be generated as a conclusion directly. Alternatively, reasoners can build mental models of situations compatible with the minor premise and use the production that incorporates the conditional to constrain these models. The two inference routes map onto the two processes in the dual-process model. They reflect not two separate systems of information processing but simply two ways of using the same system.