Mindmap

Introduction, principles and theories

The term environment comes from the Medieval French "environ" meaning to form a ring around or to surround. A more modern statement is the environment is concerned with the conditions or influences under which any person lives or is developed. So environmental psychology is concerned with "space" and all of the concepts of we have devised to represent space. Environmental psychology is concerned with space; from the intimate (personal space) through intermediate (proximal) spaces of the built environment (rooms, buildings, towns, cities etc), through to distant space involving study of the natural world, wildernesses and geographical space. Even the influence of weather on behaviour is a valid environmental psychology area. 
Environmental psychology broadly looks at behavioural responses to patterns of stimuli that people experience if they selectively move about in the intervals which lie between objects that are desired and those that are not. But it is an important principle that environmental psychology began life assuming that folk are NOT passive puppets determined by their environments. Environmental psychology involves the process of studying the transactions between people and the world that they form and inhabit.

Principles Underlying Environmental  Psychology  

• Holistic – Neither people nor the environment is (should be) broken down into small parts for analysis. What is of interest it how we respond in general to a whole setting in which we behave. This contrasts quite strongly with other traditions in psychology.  And even those psychologists who think that the "environment" is an important factor in shaping behaviour tend to think in terms of one-way cause i.e. environment determines behaviour. Traditional psychology tries always to simplify in order to investigate and measure.  Environmental psychologists suggest that complexity is what is interesting and we need to modify our rather simplistic ideas of cause and effect. This might be a digression but consider the following case (I saw it on a Tom and Jerry cartoon). There is the dog Spike sitting in his kennel and he is looking out. What he sees is Tom the cat chasing Jerry the mouse. These two are running in a circle around and around the kennel, and Jerry is going faster and faster. Butch can only look forwards out of the kennel. Eventually Tom slows and Jerry quickens so that what Spike sees is Jerry running so fast that he is almost up behind the cat, and eventually this seems to be a stable state. What Spike is seeing now looks very much like Jerry chasing Tom rather than the other way around. So is Tom still chasing Jerry? What we have is a complex relationship concerning space and time and place and observation point. How you interpret the scene requires outside knowledge, an understanding of the history of the situation, an appreciation of viewpoint and its limitations and an understanding of "typical" behaviour patterns. If you look at the developed scene from Spike's position you are seeing a (stable) snapshot of the behaviour which seems to suggest that mice chase cats. A partial view may lead to misinterpretation. Environmental psychology suggests we need to widen our horizons and take a much more elaborated view of the interrelationship of cause/effect/ influence. More and more I find myself liking the term transaction, which I think has the feel of interaction along with transformation.

• Relations between systems are important. A consequence of the holistic approach means that environmental psychology is looking in the round at more complex issues. Systems (i.e. the interrelation of variables) which seem to work as a whole are more interesting (and difficult to study) e.g. the use of CFCs in fridges may have led to global warming which has led to decrease in ozone in the atmosphere which has led to an increase in UV radiation which has led to an increase in the danger of skin cancer which is perhaps leading to a change in people's use of their environment etc. OK this is just a lengthy chain of things and perhaps not a full example of interacting systems, but I hope this is an accessible example.

• Free will. Environmental psychologists assume that the behaviour of people is not determined only by their environments. We can change the way we behave (or not – many millions of people still pay trillions of pounds/dollars etc to go sun seeking), or we can change the environment that we live in. Perhaps a fundamental aspect of our relationship with the environment is that we are continually transforming it.

• Everyday natural settings. A crucial tenet of environmental psychology is that behaviour must happen in situ. It makes no sense trying to formulate artificial analogues of the environment which we can control in order to measure how people react within the artificial constraints of control. In practice of course environmental psychologists do produce controlled environments, as part of a methodological bag of tools. But much emphasis is on "real people" in the "real world". This is difficult to do, both practically and can raise some ethical problems (more on this later).

• "Problem" orientation of research. Much environmental psychology research has been criticised in the past as being problem-oriented or problem-driven.  Part of this debate is (I think) sniffy theoreticians who hold pretty tightly to Popper's hypothetico-deductive ideas that theory is paramount. Environmental psychology (in common with lots of other areas of applied psychology) tends to be rather more inductive. That is we tend to work in a bottom-up fashion going from observations up to theory. Also environmental psychology is by its very nature pragmatic. With one or two exceptions environmental psychology has taken methods and concepts from numerous other disciplines (including non psychological ones like aesthetics, geography etc) and in some cases environmental psychology work is criticised for "not looking like real or proper psychology" – it's a point of view.

• Improving the environment is possible. Following on from the Free Will and Problem Orientation principles it's possible to see a sort of altruistic motive running through much environmental psychology. How can this be done better? How can things be structured to improve? How can we reduce the following aversive situations? Part of environmental psychology is into changing/manipulating the environment for the common good.  

• Inter/multi-disciplinary work. The pragmatic nature of environmental psychology means that environmental psychology has within in it a diversity of approach, and borrows from, and works with, other disciplines.  

 

Basic Assumptions of Environmental Psychology

• Different groups are affected differentially by environmental influences. This is tantamount to saying that the environment changes depending on the folk who perceive/transact with it. The same or similar physical/structural environment may be interpreted differently by differing groups of people. The differential nature of the effect may be due to culture, experience, expectation or a variety of other variables.
• Differential effects and extent of influence occurs. That is some behaviours are more susceptible to environmental influence than others. e.g. In buildings, lighting changes can alter mood simply, rapidly and extensively for many people. Lighting changes on the other hand have little effect on work rate, learning ability, attitudes and values.
• Many influences are unconscious. We largely go around our environments, blind to the influences and the shaping of our behaviour which happens because of where we live, work etc. The unconscious influence process is one which is often used by environmental manipulators – supermarket layout is a good example. Expensive "tempting" items are frequently placed near basic staple items to entice customers. Basic stuff like bread, eggs, sugar is/are nearly always situated in the middle depths of a supermarket so you have to pass all sorts of other tempting goodies whilst doing a basic shop.
• Representation involves mental "images". Our understanding of space and spatial concepts is a crucial part of our survival system. Representing a three dimensional system and carrying it with us requires some sort of internal map. The nature of this map seems to have many shared features between individuals, and also has some idiosyncratic properties. What seems to be the case is that the "map" is influenced by personal, psychological factors, and it may or may not reflect reality.
• Space and place have symbolic meaning for us. Our existence, experience, culture are crammed with symbolic representations to do with space. We seem to hold stereotypes of space. For example West is usually better than East. Our language reflects the notion that top is better than bottom, highlife is better than lowlife, you look up to people you admire and look down on people you despise. The centre is usually a better place to be than the periphery, to be inside is better than to be outside, etc. Culturally significant representations abound, and the bigger something is the more important and significant it is – could you imagine putting a statue of Nelson down a mineshaft rather than up on a column? The concept of a millennium hollow wouldn't get a lot of votes. If you want to show the world you are successful you have a big, but empty desk, you drive a BIG car, have a LARGE house, (even wear LOUD clothes?).

 

Theories Mindmap

Theories

Making sense of theoretical approaches to environmental psychology can be a bit problematic; much work is pragmatic and doesn't easily fit into simple categories or is classifiable under "schools" or "approaches" to psychology.

Some theories postulate a central psychological mechanism that is said to regulate the ways in which individuals deal with settings.

Adaptation level approaches assume that each of us becomes accustomed to a certain level of environmental stimulation. The common occurrence of too much or too little stimulation is a focus of arousal, overload or underload and stress. A stimulus load outside of our preferred or experienced adaptation level will affect a wide variety of our behaviours.  

A basic conceptual dichotomy is between approaches that focus on stimulation and those that focus on behavioural control.

Stimulation approaches conceptualise the physical environment as a source of sensory information that is crucial to our welfare.
Such theories suggest that one can categorise stimulation as either simple information – composed of light, colour, sound, noise, heat etc; and complex sensory information that comes from buildings, streets, other people and so on. Both types of stimulus information can vary in amount, intensity, duration, frequency etc, and also vary in meaning. Variations in stimulus amount can be studied using a variety of psycho-physical methods and measures, whereas the variation in meaning which we attribute to stimuli (our own, perhaps very personal, psychological assessment) require multiple measures and techniques from attitude scaling to qualitative assessment of interview data and the like.

The stimulation approach in summary, suggests that thinking, social interaction, work performance, feelings, health etc ALL depend on the patterning of stimulus in the environment and our responses to it.

Control theories and approaches suggest that a crucial feature of our environmental transactions is the control that we have (or think that we have) over the stimulation.  Control approaches maintain that those people who have greater control of the stimulation coming to them are better off than those that don't. Another feature/finding of control theories is that we may have considerable control in some environmental situations and minimal control in others.

A consequence of lack of control is a pattern of reactance behaviour in which we attempt to regain lost control or freedom. Learned helplessness may be a consequence of situations where attempts to regain control meet with lack of success.

Control theories suggest that boundary mechanisms are important to us and we set up (and rely on) regulatory systems to keep control as well as we are able. So for instance personal space is something that we have and need and when something/one enters that space we try to regain the boundary by moving away or producing some other behaviour. Or in circumstances where experience and expectation suggest that personal space may be invaded we invent systems to prevent or reduce the possibility of invasion – most of us when sitting on an empty park bench will sit at one end, to prevent encroachment. Very few of us will sit in the centre, or if we do, the shopping and the towels are spread out on either side of us.

Behaviour setting theory Is a different type of theoretical approach of a more holistic type. It assumes that there are consistent prescribed patterns of behaviour (programs or scripts) which exist in different settings. In every similar situation there are recurrent patterns of behaviour which are predictable. In the context of a classroom there are rules of interaction, rules of who speaks and who listens. There are rules about space usage, students don't put their feet on chairs, students don't wander from their seats etc. All parties seem to know and respect the script. Work from this orientation tends to try and describe the rules that seem to exist and the emphasis is on the similarity of behaviours between people in the same setting. Also much time is given over to looking at the features which change within settings over fairly lengthy periods of socio-cultural change. Also there is an interesting cross-cultural emphasis here on looking at how scripts may differ according to country, racial grouping, societal features.

Integral theories are attempts to look at the full complexity of everyday person-environment influences. This may be conceptualised into two sub approaches.  Firstly there is the interactionist approach which proposes that the person and the environment are separable entities but one influences the other, they are continually engaged. The other approach transactionalism (which I think I favour theoretically) suggests that the person and the environment are part of one inclusive entity and that neither the person NOR the environment can be defined without reference to the other. The person's behaviour is a part of the environment and the environment makes up part of the person's behaviour. Perhaps a complex and overly pedantic philosophical distinction, but think of trying to define the spatial concept of "left" without being able to use "right". The two concepts must exist together and are mutually dependant – one cannot be defined without reference to the other. Examples of integral approaches tend to be organismic in their emphasis in that they specify that a person's behaviour at any time is the result, not of immediate antecedents but of a complex interplay of social, environmental, and individual features. What is seen as stable behaviour is in reality only an equilibrium point between the many competing features at a particular moment in time. The integral approach attempts to understand behaviour as a result of complex forces which are external to the person but those are mediated by internal psychological processes. Now I think that's probably the best way forward if we want a true and deep understanding of behaviour, but in most cases integral theories end up relying on evidence gathered by workers using other approaches and more simple cause and effect methods.  There is I believe a need for us to look into how integral theories can develop useful methodologies of their own. 

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