Information Environment

The information environment is the combination of a person's physical and social surroundings — everything perceived through the senses, consciously or unconsciously, including built spaces, natural environments, culture, media and social interactions. It is the medium through which Evolved Impulses get Contextualisation, and the site in which the paper locates its proposed interventions.

As a conditioning apparatus

Environmental inputs are perceived through the senses, both consciously and unconsciously, and interpretation is mediated by biological factors alongside conscious and unconscious cognition. The information environment contextualises evolved impulses: food, status signalling and home environments are all contextualised differently in different places around the world, and this is why the same underlying impulse can manifest as a decorative natural artefact in one culture and a luxury vehicle in another.

Why it's the lever for intervention

Marketing, media and entertainment model and perpetuate behaviours and norms through narrative, often without intentionality — even well-meaning entertainment can unconsciously model and perpetuate ecologically destructive norms. Because behavioural susceptibility to storytelling and narrative is itself plausibly an evolved, adaptive trait, storytelling today likely still invokes that same susceptibility. This is why the paper calls the information environment "a long lever for changing behaviour, culture and norms through widescale recontextualisation," and the proposed route to Neurobiological/Fitness Gap bridging operates entirely within it.

See also

Contextualisation · Evolved Impulses · Neurobiological/Fitness Gap · Social Norms