Photo Credit: The Straits Times
(refer to References for individual photo credit)
Clayton and Myers (2009) defined availability heuristic as the estimate of probability of an event happening, that is affected by how cognitively available that event is in people’s memory (p. 26).
Environmental impacts rarely have an immediate nor direct impact on people’s lives. As such, it is difficult for humans to envision the impacts of environmental damage on them, such as the loss of biodiversity or pollution, due to its indirect impact on their life . Instead, people tend to be concerned about things that are more relevant to them and would be personally experienced by them, such as traffic congestion and competition in housing, jobs and resources.
As such, it is understandable on why Singaporeans had a lack of concern about environmental issues when the Population White Paper was released. Since Singaporeans are already experiencing issues such as congestion in public transportation and job competition now, they are concerned that an increase in Singapore’s population would worsen the current problems. Singaporeans’ lack of environmental concern could be explained by the indirect consequences and impacts of environmental damage as well as the presence of more pressing problems that they are currently and would most probably be facing in the future.