Abstract
This interdisciplinary research explores why and how cognitive biases contribute to environmental crises. While cognitive ecocriticism and the wider cognitive environmental humanities have investigated human mental processes in relation to the environment, my specific research aim is to perform a targeted analysis of a wide variety of particular cognitive biases in works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry whose authors, narrators, and protagonists were not concerned with global warming and other manifestations of the ecocrisis – and yet were implicated in it in one way or another, which is precisely what makes these works highly relevant to understanding climate change denial and related obstacles to meaningful climate action.To address the gap in existing ecocritical scholarship that I identified, in my peer-reviewed articles at the core of this research I fine-tune the established methodology of cognitive ecocriticism to examine the important role that cognitive biases play in a range of environmental problems. The objective of each article is to determine in what way a particular literary representation of cognitive biases, even without authorial intention, can help in interpreting and evaluating perceptions of and responses to environmental issues. This is achieved by combining time-tested methods of textual analysis in literary studies with advances from cognitive and environmental sciences, thus applying a focused methodology that could be further adapted for other works, genres, and periods.
My findings confirm that refracting literary works through the prism of cognitive biases offers valuable insights into the human mind’s relationship with the wider environment in the context of climate (in)action. As this critical commentary demonstrates, the significance of my research lies both in the academic contribution of its findings and in the highlighting of the synergy between ecocriticism and ecopedagogy for raising awareness and motivating real-world action in the face of the ecocrisis.
| Date of Award | 28 Jan 2026 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Mark Frost (Supervisor) & Thomas Rodgers (Supervisor) |