Environmental and Architectural Psychology

The Basics

Ian Donald

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000592610
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychology
• Sous-sujet: History & Theory in Psychology

Environmental and Architectural Psychology: The Basics is a jargon-free and accessible introduction to the relationship between people and their natural and built environment.

Exploring everything from the effectiveness of open plan offices to how people respond to life-threatening disasters, the book addresses issues around sustainability, climate change, and behaviour, and is grounded in theory and ideas drawn from psychology, geography, and architecture. Author Ian Donald introduces both the theoretical underpinnings and the applications of environment-behaviour research to solving real world problems, encouraging readers to reflect on the role of design and policy in shaping the environments in which they live and work. With chapters considering the impact of environment on identity, wellbeing, crime, and spatial behaviour, Donald shows us not only how people shape and affect the environment, but also in turn how the environment shapes and affects people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

Addressing some of the most important questions of our time, including how behaviour drives climate change, and what we can do about it, this is the ideal book for anyone interested in the interactions between architecture, the environment, and psychology.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Oliver Donald for putting up with me writing this book. He is, as I type this, watching a film we are supposed to be watching together. I’m grateful to him for taking the time every day, including today, to ask how it is going. At last I can tell him, it’s gone.

It is completely unreasonable to ask a friend and colleague to read and comment on a complete draft manuscript within two weeks of it needing to be submitted. As that is exactly what I have done, I am especially grateful to Dr Margaret Wilson for responding to such an unreasonable request and for still managing to laugh about it. Margaret is that rare person, a friend who can be an honest, sometimes ruthless critic. This book is significantly better because of her input.

I could not write acknowledgements for a book on environmental psychology without mentioning David Canter, whose influence on my thinking in psychology is clearly evident in this volume.

Eleanor Taylor at Routledge initially suggested the book and has been patient and supportive well beyond the call of duty. I am very grateful.

I would like to acknowledge and thank the University of Liverpool for its continued support. Without access to their library and other facilities this book would have been very much more difficult to write.

1 INTRODUCTION AND BRIEF HISTORY OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND ARCHITECTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

DOI: 10.4324/9780429274541-1

The Beginning

Let’s begin our exploration of environmental and architectural psychology with two observations. The first is that:

A person’s behaviour can be more accurately predicted from knowing where they are than knowing who they are.

To psychologists who have spent a lot of time developing measures of individual differences and personality tests from which to predict behaviour that might come as a worrying surprise. Nonetheless, it is the case that a person will behave very differently in a religious building, a sports stadium, or an office. The same group of students will act differently in a lecture theatre, an exam room, or when they are out for an evening together. There will, of course, be individual differences on display within each of those settings, but overall the framework for behaviour is provided by the place someone is in more than it is by their scores on the dimensions of a personality test. This obvious and basic observation has many implications, but for now we will stick with what it means for psychology.

Frequently, experimental psychologists see the environment as a hindrance. They spend a lot of time, thought, and energy designing experiments that remove as much of the environment as possible. The environment is controlled for and cancelled out, rather than studied and understood as something intrinsic to behaviour. There is a very nice comment from Helen Ross (1974) in which she makes the point that “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” (quoted in Canter, 1975, p. 5). Another way of saying this is that we know a lot about what people do in psychology laboratories, but much less about what they do in real environments.

If experimental psychology removes the environmental from research, environmental psychology puts it back. To understand behaviour, we need to situate it in its environment. That means, amongst other things, we need to know where the behaviour is, what the rules of that place are, how they are understood, what people are trying to achieve in that place, and who else is there. This takes us beyond the physical environment to a more complex understanding of a world that brings together many other elements, including social, physical, cultural, and cognitive phenomena. Complex as it may be, we understand how these components work together. We construct the environment in our minds and share a comprehension of it with others who use that place. If that were not the case, the places and settings we inhabit would not function. Interestingly, it is when one of the components does not work, or when we do not share an understanding with those around us, that we notice our environment. One instance of this is when we travel to different cultures. We soon discover that many places do not operate in the same ways as we are used to. Rarely in the West, for instance, are you asked to remove your shoes when you enter a restaurant. Western visitors can also, for example, find the proximity at which people stand in the Middle East uncomfortable. Therefore, if you remove all the elements that comprise our environment, and then try to understand how someone behaves, it is likely that you will have a very poor understanding of what people do when they leave the laboratory.

The second observation is that:

The environment is not random. Everything you see around you is the product of human thought and decision-making.

What that means is that someone somewhere has made a decision that has produced the environment that surrounds us, all the time. Each bit of our surroundings is the result of a conscious thought. The decisions may have resulted from social processes and movements, habits, fashions, or a host of other factors, but at the root will be found people making decisions. Very often those making the decisions will have a theory, implicit or explicit, about how people will perceive that environment and how they will behave in it. This might be small scale, such as when someone decorates their house, and assume their friends will like it, or a teacher rearranging a classroom to achieve a particular learning environment and change the way pupils interact. It can also be large scale, planning a city, or a country’s transport infrastructure. One of the challenges that we face in making these decisions is whether our theories about how others will relate to those setting are correct or not. Through testing theories and rigorous empirical research, environmental psychology aims to provide a sound and valid basis for making those decisions and understanding the implications of those that have already been made.

It is worth pointing out that, although less obvious, the same is true for the natural environment, which is rarely the outcome of natural processes. The typical English landscape, for instance, of fields and dry stonewalls, or heather covered moors are the product of human decision-making. The choices people have made for agriculture, ownership, and commercial purposes have shaped our landscape. Forests have disappeared because tress have been felled, but less obviously more trees never get beyond a few inches because we graze animals that eat small shoots that will never grow and together form forests.

It is quite possible that in some parts of the world there are large areas of wilderness or unspoiled forest that are devoid of human influence. These might be found in the large regions of rainforest, or North American wilderness. But now even areas devoid of local human influence are being changed as human activity has a significant and detrimental impact on the planet’s climate. The polar region’s shrinking ice caps, and the fires and the droughts being seen around the world are the result of our choices.

Understanding that the environment is the product of our decision-making can lead to a great number of questions about why environments are the way they are and how they impact on the people who use them. Psychology, of course, is not alone in examining the environment and our relationship with it. One of the central claims of environmental psychology has always been that it is an interdisciplinary endeavour. In the next section, we will very briefly mention some of the other disciples and professions that have an interest in our surroundings.

Disciplines with a Strong Interest in the Environment

There are several disciplines that consider the environment and its relationship to behaviour. Some of these disciplines are directly related to psychology while others are not. As a multidisciplinary field environmental and architectural psychology is happy to draw on all of them.

Psychophysics is a discipline that is closely tied to mainstream perceptual psychology and could be argued to be the root of experimental psychology. Psychophysics tends to be concerned with the relationship between very specific, discrete environmental stimuli, such as a sound or light, and the resulting sensation or perception of that stimuli. The discipline therefore works at a reductionist level. In contrast, environmental and architectural psychology usually examines the environment at a molar level as well as including more subjective elements. That is not to say, however, that psychophysics is irrelevant to environmental psychology. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that it occupies a relatively small, specialised corner of the discipline.

Ergonomics or human factors is the design of products, systems, and processes to fit the physical capabilities of people. Its aim is to ensure that the environment fits the person, physically and psychologically, rather than the person having to adapt to the environment. The Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors characterises the practice as bringing together knowledge from several disciplines including physiology, anatomy, engineering, and psychology. Traditionally focused on work environments and products, the field has expanded to incorporate cognitive ergonomics. It has also moved out of the workplace and is now applied in broader settings including in the design of household objects, cars, and an array of machines and appliances that we encounter every day.

Environmental sociology is focused on the interaction between societal issues and broader social movements (Lockie, 2015). It is less concerned with individual responses than psychophysics and ergonomics. Knight (2018) identifies four broad areas of interest to environmental sociologists: the social causes of environmental problems, the societal impacts and influences of the natural environment, how environmental threats and challenges are reacted to, and understanding social processes that can lead to environmental change and sustainability. While environmental sociology operates at a societal level, many of the areas of interest are shared with environmental psychology, which is more than happy to draw on and use the work and methods of sociologists.

Behavioural geography is perhaps, of all the other disciplines outside of psychology, the one that has most contributed to environmental psychology. There would even be an argument for the idea that it has contributed more to the development of the discipline than mainstream psychology. Behavioural geography texts often resemble the content of psychology books on environmental cognition. A geographer might put that the other way around. The history of behavioural geography in many ways parallels that of environmental psychology. Its development in earnest began in the 1960s, as a reaction against what has been characterised as descriptive geography and was an attempt to move towards a more theory-driven part of the discipline. It has made a significant contribution to our thinking and understanding of place, especially from a phenomenological perspective, as we will see in Chapter 2. Another major focus of geographers is environmental cognition. In this they borrow from psychology but also make a considerable contribution to it. As well as environmental cognition, behavioural geographers look at such things as the cognitive basis of spatial decision-making. While sociology tends to operate at a molar level, and psychophysics at a micro-level, like environmental psychology, behavioural geography works across the whole spectrum.

Some years ago, geographer John Gold (1980) characterised behavioural geography. Described by Gold, behavioural geography distinguishes between and examines both the ‘objective’ world and ‘the world of the mind’. It recognises that people shape the world as well as respond to it. It focuses on the individual rather than on social groups or societies. Finally, behavioural geography has a multidisciplinary approach. Comparing Gold’s description with Gifford’s (2002) description of environmental psychology that we discuss below shows them to be at least siblings, if not twins. Many geographers have made contributions to environmental psychology and are an integral part of it (Kitchen, Blades & Golledge, 1997).

Planning is one of the main disciplines that create our environments. It is generally concerned with the large-scale locations or facilities and the routes between them. These include the layout of cities, neighbourhoods, and university campuses, for instance. Planning is often based on assumptions and data about how people move around, use information, navigate, make decisions, and interact socially. Planners are therefore interested in how people understand their environments and how they cognitively structure them. Planners have made some significant contributions to our understanding of person-environment r...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Index