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Slides 0HM260 – Environmental Psychology0HM260 – Environmental Psychology
Workshop 1
Environmental psychology is concerned with the role of the environment in human behavior.
B=(F(P,E). It aims at understanding and formalizing what the function (F) is between persona and
environment in order to better predict human behavior and experience.
Behavior: any observable overt movement of the organism generally taken to include verbal behavior
as well as physical movements. Different aspects of behavior:
- Movement
- Intentional
- Controllable
- Observable
- Demarcated in time and space
- Molar vs molecular
Action: any behavior that is intentional and controllable by the individual.
Stimulus: molecular part of situations/environments that can be described objectively or subjectively.
Situation: singular or recurring molar event in an environment, which can be described objectively or
subjectively.
Environment: universe of situations organism encounters in daily living our ecological
environment.
Different worldviews:
- Trait (personism): unit of analysis is the person. Components of the unit are personality
dimensions or other psychological attributes (Attitude).
- Consequences: unit of analysis are environmental conditions during an event.
Interactionist: Unit of analysis are environmental conditions and the person as two separate entities.
Components of person: attitude, motives.
Components of environment: behavior constraints & opportunities, social norms. The cause of
behavior is not determined by either the person or the environment.
Organismic perspective: unit of analysis is the system of person and environment. Person and
environment are seen as separate entities but the system of person and environment is more than the
sum of its part.
Transactional: unit of analysis are phenomena involving person, environment and time as parts of an
inseparable holistic unity.
The difference between the organismic and transactional perspective is the extent to which person
and environment can be described as independent entities.
Lecture 1
According to Cassidy definitions have limitations:
- Over-simplified summaries of a field of inquiry and never encompass everything related to it.
- Impose boundaries to a field of inquire that may exclude important areas of research.
- Never up-to-date given that psychology is continuously changing.
How to characterize environmental psychology:
- Through principles that environmental psychologists share
- Through structure of the discipline
- Through its historical roots
The psychology roots are found in those thinkers who argued against the dominant disciplines in
which behavior was explained either by characteristics of the individual (personism) or by
characteristics of the situation (situationism). The building engineering roots are found in those
thinkers who applied psychological insights to solving problems in architecture and urban planning.
First empirical psychological laboratory: Wundt (1879):
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, Slides 0HM260 – Environmental Psychology
Structuralism (Titchener, 1884): identifying molecules of mind. Introspection as main method.
Behaviorism (1913): Werthheimer, Koffka, Köhler: Critique on introspection it itself is a conscious
process, thus interfering with describing the process of the mind. Psychology as study of behavior.
Mind as a black box: stimulus-response relationships.
Gestalt psychology: criticized behaviorism for its focus on overt behavior at the expense of covert
behavior and experience. A gestalt is a coherent whole. It has its own laws and is a construct of the
individual mind rather than reality.
Koffka: the whole is other than the sum of its parts.
Personality psychology (1930): Allport, Catell
Traits: relatively stable personal dispositions that together make up one’s personality.
Personality: that which permits a prediction of what a particular person will do in a given situation.
Lewin’s field theory (1935): different individuals display the same behavior in a certain environment.
Across environments a single individual may behave in very different ways. Behavior is a function of
person and environment B=F(P,E).
Life space: totality of psychological forces that affect an individual’s behavior and which changes over
time as people mature. It consists of the individual (P) in his or her psychological environment (E).
Psychological forces, positive and negative valences, can come from within the person or are
perceived to be present in the environment by the individual at a given time. How a person behaves in
a given situation is determined by the totality of external and internal forces (net force or vector sum)
Barker’s ecological psychology (1947): life space is a psychological variable and thus dependent
on the individual. To understand the role of the environment, it somehow has to be described
independent of the individual and his or her behavior.
Behavioral settings: self-regulating, active systems, composed of people and objects, that coerce
behavior in predictable ways.
Brunswick’s functionalism and representative design (1953): mind has developed in and thus is
highly adapted to our ecological environment (biological niche). As a result we cannot understand the
human psyche without taking in to account the ecological environment.
Environmental psychology:
- Behavior is shaped by both person and environment.
- Holistic view on the environment: it is not a set of isolated stimuli but a totality.
- Interdisciplinary
- Eclectic methodology
- Ecological validity through representative design.
- Not always a sharp distinction between applied and fundamental research.
Different types of person-environment functions:
- Interactionist: environment and person are separate entities but engage in reciprocal
interactions of some sort.
- Organismic: Person and environment are seen as separate entities but system of person
and environment is more than sum of its parts. Not the characteristics of the separate entities
are crucial in explaining behavior but their contribution to characteristics of the system.
- Transactionalism: Person, environment and time are inseparable holistic unity: There is
confluence of inseparable factors that depend on one another for their definition and meaning.
Fundamental research is conducted with the sole aim of understanding human-behavior
interrelationships, but results are not necessarily directly applicable.
Definitions of environmental psychology:
- Burroughs (1989): study of relationships between physical environment and human behavior
- Bell (2001): study of molar relationship between behavior and experience and built and
natural environments
- Stokols (1978): study of interface between human behavior and the sociophysical
environment
Molar: relating to larger units
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