Thinking as Behavior Scientists, Acting as Designers

Abstract

In September 1975, I was an eager second year student at the University of Padua, a conservative Northern Italian town with a great university founded in the year 1222. My department was a fervent center of critical studies, open to the future of humanities and science. I had just completed my first year and my favorite professors had already given me the initial critical lesson that I still remember. Laboratory research—they said—is the most credible way we know to understand our cognitive and behavior processes, although we are not sure how to best use this knowledge and generalize it in real-life situations. That was the time when the ecological validity of experimental research was making inroads in the critical minds of Europe’s research laboratories. Nowadays we can say that the ambitious aim to develop accurate generalizable knowledge to real-life contexts has been achieved and repeatedly proved beyond doubts, as this book describes. Humanistic, anthropologic, psychological, and sociological research can supply the scientific evidence, data, and behavior models to base intervention programs and facilitate behavior and culture modification favoring sustainable societies and lifestyles.