Environmental psychology is an interdisciplinary field focused on the interplay between humans and their surroundings.

Since the late 1940s, the field has seen significant research findings and a fair surge of interest in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but has challenges of nomenclature, getting objective and repeatable results, scope, and the underlying limitations of perceptual psychology.

Behavior settings

Roger Barker founded his research station in the tiny Kansas town of Oskaloosa (renamed "Midwest" for publication) in 1947, and ran it for several decades. From detailed observations he developed the theory that social settings influence behavior. In a store, people assume their roles as customers; in school and church, proper behavior somehow already resides coded in the place. Barker spent his career expanding on what he called ecological psychology, identifying these behavior settings , and publishing accounts like "One Boy's Day" (1951). Some of the minute-by-minute observations of Kansan children from morning to night, jotted down by young and maternal gradate students, may be the most intimate and poignant documents in social science. The "behavior setting" remains a valid principle which receives serious attention.

Barker argued that the psychologist should use T-Methods (psychologist as 'transducer': i.e. methods which study Man in his 'natural environment') rather than O-Methods (psychologist as "operator" i.e. experimental methods). In other words, he preferred field work and direct observation.

Another school of psychology similar to (but not identical with) environmental psychology is J.J. Gibson's ecological psychology. Gibson is best known for inventing the word affordance, a description of how elements of the environment can physically restrict movement in an objectively measurable way.

University of Strathclyde

Another strain of environmental psychology developed out of ergonomics in the 1960s. The beginning of this movement can be traced back to David Canter 's work and the founding of the "Performance Research Unit" at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1966, which expanded traditional ergonomics to study broader issues relating to the environment and the extent to which human beings were "situated" within it (cf situated cognition). Canter led the field for years and is still the editor of the Journal of Environmental Psychology , but has recently turned his attention to criminology.

Proxemics

Another thinker who has had a profound influence on environmental psychology is the anthropologist E. T. Hall. Hall is the author of "The Hidden Dimension " which developed and popularized the concepts of personal space and his more general name for this field, proxemics. He defined proxemics as, ". . . the study of how man unconsciously structures microspace - the distance between men in the conduct of daily transactions, the organization of space in his houses and buildings, and ultimately the layout of his towns."

Hall defined and measured four interpersonal "zones":

• intimate (0 to 18 inches)
• personal (18 inches to 4 feet)
• social (4 feet to 12 feet)
• public (12 feet and beyond)

In "The Hidden Dimension" he famously observed that the precise distance we feel 'comfortable' with other being people being near us is culturally determined: Saudis, Norweigans, Milanese and Japanese will have differing notions of 'close'. In one of his best known empirical studies, Hall carrried out an analysis of employee reactions to Eero Saarinen's last work, the John Deere World Headquarters Building.

Impact

In the 1970s and 1980s environmental psychology used insights taken from the broader environmental movement to look at the behaviours of people in hospitals, schools, factories and so on, to see the impact of these environments on behaviour, and how these settings might be improved to create a better work environment.

These years saw an effort to establish architectural psychology in a hopeful move towards design professionals. There were parallel efforts, on civic scale, for better pedestrian landscapes, involving figures like Jane Jacobs and Jan Gehl. The prime figure there is the writer and researcher William H. Whyte and his still-refreshing and perceptive "City", based on his accumulated observations of skilled Manhattan pedestrians, steps, and patterns of use in urban plazas.

No equivalent organized knowledge of environmental psychology has developed out of architecture. Most prominent American architects, led until recently by Philip Johnson who was very strong on this point, view their job as an art form. They see little or no responsibility for the social or function impact of their designs.

Environmental psychology has conquered one whole architectural genre, although it's a bitter victory: retail stores, and any other commerical venue where the power to manipulate the mood and behavior of customers, places like stadiums, casinos, malls, and now airports. From Philip Kotler's landmark paper on Atmospherics and Alan Hirsch 's "Effects of Ambient Odors on Slot-Machine Usage in a Las Vegas Casino", through the creation and management of the Gruen transfer, retail relies heavily on psychology, original research, focus groups, and direct observation. One of William Whyte's students, Paco Underhill , makes a living as a "shopping anthropologist". The problem is, most of this most-advanced research remains a trade secret and proprietary.

As researcher Helen Ross said about her own field: "We know a great deal about the perception of a one-eyed man with his head in a clamp watching glowing lights in a dark room but surprisingly little about his perceptual ability in a real-life situation."

Other notable researchers and writers in related fields include Robert Sommer , Jay Appleton , Kevin Lynch , Amos Rapoport , and Harold Prohansky .

Further Reading

Bell P., Greene T., Fisher, J., & Baum, A. (1996). Environmental Psychology. Ft Worth: Harcourt Brace.

Stokols, D. and I. Altman [Eds.] (1987). Handbook of Environmental Psychology. New York: Wiley.