The Dutch dominant perspective on water: risks and opportunities involved.

To implement or continue water management strategies social support is needed. Social support highly depends on people's perspectives on water. However, these perspectives are not static and may change over time leading to changes in social support for strategies. Therefore, sustainable water management strategies should be robust. Robust strategies are able to cope with changing social and environmental developments. Lacking robustness runs the risk of losing social support, which may force policymakers into sudden or expensive measures. We use the Perspectives Method to analyze the present Dutch policy perspective and the dominant perspective on water among Dutch water professionals, by respectively studying the Dutch Delta report and questionnaire outputs and distinguishing between Hierarchical, Egalitarian, Individualistic and Fatalistic perspectives. A comparison between the policy and professional perspective shows similarities and differences. Topics regarding drought, water supply, and waters' relation to spatial planning need serious reconsideration to guarantee enough present and future social support to implement the measures suggested in the policy report.

Testing the Social Function of Metacognition for Common-Pool Resource Use.

Metacognition, the ability to monitor and evaluate our own cognitive processes, confers advantages to individuals and their own judgment. A more recent hypothesis, however, states that explicit metacognition may also enhance the collective judgment of groups, and may enhance human collaboration and coordination. Here, we investigate this social function hypothesis of metacognition with arguably one of the oldest collaboration problems humans face, common-pool resource use. Using an agent-based model that simulates repeated group interactions and the forming of collective judgments about resource extraction, we show that (1) in "kind" environments (where confidence and judgment accuracy correlate positively), explicit metacognition may allow groups to reach more accurate judgments compared to groups exchanging object-level information only; while (2) in "wicked" environments (where confidence and judgment accuracy correlate negatively), explicit metacognition may protect groups from the large judgment errors yielded by groups using metacognitive information for individual-level learning only (implicit metacognition). With explicit metacognition, this research highlights a novel mechanism which, among others, provides a testable explanation of the often-observed finding that groups all over the world communicate to enhance common property use.

Untangling social-ecological interactions: A methods portfolio approach to tackling contemporary sustainability challenges in fisheries.

Meeting the objectives of sustainable fisheries management requires attention to the complex interactions between humans, institutions and ecosystems that give rise to fishery outcomes. Traditional approaches to studying fisheries often do not fully capture, nor focus on these complex interactions between people and ecosystems. Despite advances in the scope and scale of interactions encompassed by more holistic methods, for example ecosystem-based fisheries management approaches, no single method can adequately capture the complexity of human-nature interactions. Approaches that combine quantitative and qualitative analytical approaches are necessary to generate a deeper understanding of these interactions and illuminate pathways to address fisheries sustainability challenges. However, combining methods is inherently challenging and requires understanding multiple methods from different, often disciplinarily distinct origins, demanding reflexivity of the researchers involved. Social-ecological systems' research has a history of utilising combinations of methods across the social and ecological realms to account for spatial and temporal dynamics, uncertainty and feedbacks that are key components of fisheries. We describe several categories of analytical methods (statistical modelling, network analysis, dynamic modelling, qualitative analysis and controlled behavioural experiments) and highlight their applications in fisheries research, strengths and limitations, data needs and overall objectives. We then discuss important considerations of a methods portfolio development process, including reflexivity, epistemological and ontological concerns and illustrate these considerations via three case studies. We show that, by expanding their methods portfolios, researchers will be better equipped to study the complex interactions shaping fisheries and contribute to solutions for sustainable fisheries management.

Mind the mind: How to effectively communicate about cognition in social-ecological systems research.

Social-ecological systems (SES) research underlines the tremendous impact of human behaviour on planet Earth. To enable a sustainable course of humanity, the integration of human cognition in SES research is crucial for better understanding the processes leading to and involved in human behaviour. However, this integration is proving a challenge, not only in terms of diverging ontological and epistemological perspectives, but also-and this has received little attention in SES research-in terms of (lacking) precision of communication regarding cognition. SES scholars often implicitly disagree on the meaning of this broad concept due to unexpressed underlying assumptions and perspectives. This paper raises awareness for the need to communicate clearly and mindfully about human cognition by exemplifying common communication pitfalls and ways of preventing them. We focus on the concept of cognition itself and provide aspects of cognition that need to be communicated explicitly, i.e. different objects of investigation and levels of description. Lastly, we illustrate means of overcoming communication pitfalls by the example of rationality.

Cooperation Is Not Enough­Exploring Social-Ecological Micro-Foundations for Sustainable Common-Pool Resource Use [corrected].

Cooperation amongst resource users holds the key to overcoming the social dilemma that characterizes community-based common-pool resource management. But is cooperation alone enough to achieve sustainable resource use? The short answer is no. Developing management strategies in a complex social-ecological environment also requires ecological knowledge and approaches to deal with perceived environmental uncertainty. Recent behavioral experimental research indicates variation in the degree to which a group of users can identify a sustainable exploitation level. In this paper, we identify social-ecological micro-foundations that facilitate cooperative sustainable common-pool resource use. We do so by using an agent-based model (ABM) that is informed by behavioral common-pool resource experiments. In these experiments, groups that cooperate do not necessarily manage the resource sustainably, but also over- or underexploit. By reproducing the patterns of the behavioral experiments in a qualitative way, the ABM represents a social-ecological explanation for the experimental observations. We find that the ecological knowledge of each group member cannot sufficiently explain the relationship between cooperation and sustainable resource use. Instead, the development of a sustainable exploitation level depends on the distribution of ecological knowledge among the group members, their influence on each other's knowledge, and the environmental uncertainty the individuals perceive. The study provides insights about critical social-ecological micro-foundations underpinning collective action and sustainable resource management. These insights may inform policy-making, but also point to future research needs regarding the mechanisms of social learning, the development of shared management strategies and the interplay of social and ecological uncertainty.

Cognition from life: the two modes of cognition that underlie moral behavior.

We argue that the capacity to live life to the benefit of self and others originates in the defining properties of life. These lead to two modes of cognition; the coping mode that is preoccupied with the satisfaction of pressing needs and the co-creation mode that aims at the realization of a world where pressing needs occur less frequently. We have used the Rule of Conservative Changes - stating that new functions can only scaffold on evolutionary older, yet highly stable functions - to predict that the interplay of these two modes define a number of core functions in psychology associated with moral behavior. We explore this prediction with five examples reflecting different theoretical approaches to human cognition and action selection. We conclude the paper with the observation that science is currently dominated by the coping mode and that the benefits of the co-creation mode may be necessary to generate realistic prospects for a modern synthesis in the sciences of the mind.