Whenever we go to the supermarket, we usually check out the labels and search for organic food productions. Especially nowadays, when GMO food productions are scattered all across the country, with some regions tainted with fears of nuclear waste. But in reality, how much do we really know about organic food? Are we aware of how these crops are planted and harvested, and can confirm that they are truly, in depth, organic? If you really do, it means that you have a high sence of Eco-Q, a.k.a. intellectual capacities regarding the environment.

Many of us are short-sighted when it comes to environmental problems we tend to think that it is much healthier to use paper bags instead of plastic bags. When we have to buy new products from the story, we usually consider the price and the quality. The higher the price, the better the brand, we trust the product in terms of quality. Psychologists have identified this tendency as the desire to lighten the weight of the stress caused by the excessive number of brands and prices we are forced to deliberate on every day. Consumers only striving to buy cheaper products are unaware of the numerous alternations and processes companies have gone through, eventually lowering the quality of the product itself.

For example, most consumers can identify eco-marks or organic-green-food production marks with the naked eye, but not many can actually be sure that a certain product is organic in depth. Often, we pay higher prices for what we see as healthier, or, in other words, what the store says is greener. Parents buy organic vegetables to prepare the healthiest possible dishes for their children.

Even worse, many of us fail to see the big picture when we are faced with issues regarding the environment. The common public believes that it is eco-friendlier to use personal bags instead of plastic bags when going to the supermarket. Still, many of these supposed eco-bags do not go through processes of environment-toxic-filtration, unlike most food productions do. We are quite aware of the prices, quality, brands, and advertisements of the world that attract our senses, but apathetic towards green policies and other factors in life that are intermittent with the idea of environment conservation. While our brains have successfully evolved to pick out and identify the short-term dangers in our lives, we do not plan much about the faraway future.

For instance, any one of us would run away when we are confronted with a beastly lion, but we are usually unaware of global issues like climate change. A number of great scientists have identified the world's greatest issues today as the problems regarding nuclear weapons, arguing that the impacts of the cold war has not even started to fizzle. They say that other problems, like global warming or food shortage are relatively slow-term, so that other problems are to be cleared out first. According to the Just Noticeable Differences JND of the biologist Ernst Heinrich Weber, we humans cannot sense slight fluctuations of the course of the environment, the rate of the changes falling under the average JND. The psychologist Daniel Gilbert claimed that climate change should take place faster, so that the public would be aware of the dangers it beholds.

Geroge A. Akerlof said that, when people are buying and selling cars at secondhand car shops, consumers and producers often get into arguments because each side has a different understanding of the product, and has different information about the product in hand. [Greenwashing] in marketing refers to - simply accentuating and advertising the eco-friendliness and green-image of the company, but not actually being green at all in truth, and actually contributing the destruction of the environment. Such hypocrisy has actually proved to be quite effective in terms of marketing.

Companies that [Greenwash] advertise that their products are eco-friendly, without much objective reasons of support. They illegally download green-marks or recycle-marks so that consumers would want to buy their products. Although most rational consumers do not 100% buy into everything such companies tell them about their greenness, they do have a tendency towards companies that value eco-friendly policies. Such advertisements provoke them into buying non-eco-friendly products in disguise.

IMAGE SOURCE: NAVERCAST