#I'm going to end up giving my group a soc 101 crash course aren't I?

[bywandandsword]

Friends, it is so hard being the only social scientist in a class of ecologists, it really is

It's a Human Dimensions of Conservation and Ecology class, basically, how are conservation and ecology efforts affect and are affected by people. From asking around, few if any of my classmates have ever considered this question, which is absolutely wild to me! We got assigned to groups to do the semester project in and every Friday we do group discussions on the week's topic of study and the semester project

Y'all

I spent half this class explaining to my group what the prof is calling the cognitive approach was when studying human behavior. Basically, it's that a person's values are socially constructed but the research indicates that one's values is not a good predictor of human behavior, because you also have to factor in things like norms, individual attitudes towards things, and behavioral intentions. The discussion prompt was to look at a social problem and apply the cognative approach to it. And y'all, my group mates could not wrap their heads around it or apply it for the life of them. Like, I don't think it's a difficult concept? And the prof explained it very thoroughly, so I have no idea what the disconnect was? It's like they've never had to look at how things are effected by multiple, conflicting factors before, which can't be the case cause ecology has that too. We're just applying it to humans and using variables that at qualitative, not quantitative