News on environmental threats on planet Earth are exploding in the media. This summer 2021, the Intergovernmental panel on climate change is warning the public, policy makers and the business community of the harmful effects of mankind on climate change through pollution, including accelerating loss of biodiversity and even the prospect of extinction of homo sapiens. Some experts in sustainability are taking stock of the failure of the concept of sustainable development becoming essentially mitigations of unsustainability.

Despite the urgency to think and act differently, the teaching of sustainable development or sustainability in universities, particularly in management schools, is most often absent in general courses or limited to develop ‘weak sustainability’ skills and competencies. In fact, weak sustainability implies cognition mainly as computation although strong sustainability implies situated cognition, an evolution of cognitive science seeing not only the mind but the body and the environment as integral constituents of human cognition. This project hypothesizes that students trained in an emancipatory mode will acquire the needed competences of change agents. In fact, researchers in Education for sustainable development make clear the opposition between knowledge-and rules-based Education for sustainable development vs and Education for sustainable development centered on the learner and seeking to develop her reflexive competence in a situated cognition mode toward strong sustainability and a flourishing future.

This research will thus examine the cognition and sustainability link during a board game associating dyads cooperating in the solution of a complex environmental situations, one player in a context of computation and the other in a context of situated cognition. Each player completes a pre-test and a post-test on their knowledge of the physical environment, particularly climate change. During the game, each player has a dedicated screen with resources relevant to the computation (eg: historical data series; calculable models) while the other has a screen giving access to narratives and videos. Neurological measurements are carried out in the NeuroLab with the necessary infrastructures. Following from our review of the literature and on the basis of our recent examination of (a) the intra-individual relationships between affect and cognition, (b) the inter-individual affect-affect, cognition-cognition and affect-cognition relationships, we observe and analyse (1) how are the previous processes related to cognition and education to sustainability , and (2) among the previous processes and considering agency, how are co-regulated shifts in agency (player, bystander) related to cognition and education to sustainability? The potential benefits of this project are as follows:1. Better understanding of the role of the brain in solving complex environmental problems. 2. New courses and programs at the three cycles in the Faculties of Education and Business Schools. 3. Clarify the cognitive processes of decision-makers who seek to avoid greenwashing and tackle complex situations head-on.