Transcription
Greetings Earthlings! I'm Dr. Shawn Burn. I'll be your professor for environmental psychology this quarter. Environmental psychology is interesting and it's exciting, and I sure hope you enjoy it!
So starting at the start, I want to remind you what psychology is. It is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes. In other words, it's about how we think, how we feel, and how we behave-- our cognitions, our affect, and our behavior. And psychology has a lot of different sub-disciplines because humans are complicated, and so we look at people from a variety of different perspectives.
So for instance, biopsychology looks at us from a neurobiological point of view; it's about how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by our nervous system and our brain. Developmental psychology is about the study of development over the lifespan from birth to death. Social psychology is the study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by other people. Very interesting topic indeed!
Environmental psychology also has its own unique lens. It's about the interplay between people in the physical environment-- both natural physical environments and the built environment --that is, human-made environments. And the word "interplay" is important here because environments act on us and affect how we feel, and how we think, and how we behave, but also how we feel and think and behave affect our experience of the physical environment. And of course, we also act on the physical environment. We build and modify environments to suit our needs.
Next I want to talk to you about two fundamental beliefs underlying the environmental psychology endeavor. These two core beliefs have to do with this interplay between people and the natural and built environment. And the first one has to do with the fact that environments matter, that physical environments matter, and they should be the subject matter of psychology. After all, they affect how we think, they affect how we feel, they affect how we behave. They affect our well-being, both our psychological well-being and our physical well-being. They affect our productivity, they affect our efficiency, they affect our goal accomplishment.
You know, so the physical environment matters. So think about this for a second. You know, think about the last time you went to an amusement park. You know those queues that you know sort of help you line up when you're waiting for a ride? Those were originally developed by an environmental psychologist. And the thought was, "How do we manage waiting behavior? How do we make people feel calmer about wait that's ahead of them? How do we make them think the line is shorter than it actually is?"
You know, think about it. You know when you're all "mazed up" like that the wait does seem shorter. You know it does make you feel a little bit calmer, it makes you feel like progress is being made as the line moves. It's actually, you know, really a stroke of genius when you when you think about it.
How about a scenic beauty? Certainly most of you have been in a place of great scenic beauty, a place that took your breath away, that inspired awe, that made you feel better for having been there, you know, made you feel calmer, more rejuvenated, more positive about life. So again, physical environments can affect how we feel, right?
Think about places of worship. You know what I mean if you've ever been in a place of worship where the design of that physical environment enhanced the spiritual experience. So again, you know, as far as the first fundamental belief underlying environmental psychology, the idea is that physical environments matter to people, right? They affect how we feel, how we think, how we behave.
So a second fundamental belief underlying this endeavor is that psychology has a lot to offer as far as the design of the built environment and also to promoting environmental sustainability, so you'll see this theme throughout our class. Pretty much everything that we talk about will also talk about its implications for designing environments that better support our psychological and emotional needs, that promote our health and well-being, both physical and mental. Even how the design of the physical environment affects productivity. Likewise, we'll talk a lot about pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors and we'll see too that psychology has a lot to say about promoting environmental sustainability.
Let's talk about three general features of environmental psychology. And the first one is that environmental psychology is "holistic." By that we mean this is a complex human-environment system. It is not as some simple direct causal relationship between people and their environments-- not at all! So remember that definition of environmental psychology emphasizes this notion of an interplay between people in their physical environments. Again, this is more like an environmental system with lots of different layers, lots of different things that are mediating, influencing this complex relationship. And that includes your personality, your goals, and your emotional state and how they influence how the environment impacts you. Your culture, your social class-- you know how much money you have-- other people, all of these things are also other layers of this environment-person relationship, you know. So a holistic approach makes sense in environmental psychology because the interrelationship between people and physical settings is complicated. It's influenced by individual, social, environmental, and biological factors and how those interact.
Let me give you some examples starting with individual and social differences. "Density" refers to the number of people per physical space unit. A high density setting is one where the number of people relative to physical space is high, but whether we experience high density as crowding depends partly on our personality. Extroverts are less likely to experience high density as crowding than are introverts. Gender affects the distances we prefer between ourselves and others. So for example, women prefer larger personal space zones when interacting with men. How you respond to traffic congestion depends on your goals and whether you're high in what we call "trait anger." If you're late for an important date, obviously traffic congestion will affect you more, and people that are quick to anger when frustrated are more likely to experience road rage when faced with traffic congestion. Throughout our course we'll see that social class affects the environmental experience. For example, lower income people are exposed to more environmental stressors, including environmental pollution. Culture impacts the people-environment relationship. For example, when we study privacy we'll find that cultures vary in how they use architecture to maintain privacy. The objective physical qualities of the environment also affect our environmental experience. For example, when we study noise as an environmental stressor we'll learn that unpredictable, uncontrollable sound is most likely to be perceived as stressful noise. The design of a physical space also affects our experience of an environment. For example, when the design of an environment thwarts our goals or limits our movements we're more likely to experience it as stressful. When we study restorative environments we'll learn that natural environments are more likely to possess the elements that restore us. Natural environments with qualities that make us feel like we're in another world and away from our everyday life, for instance, help us recover from stress and restore our cognitive abilities. When we study environmental perception we'll learn that some features of the environment are more "salient" or perceptually noticeable. These have a bigger impact on our environmental experience. For example, some environmental elements are more noticeable because of their size, their smell, or their loudness. We are biological beings and human biological, physiological, sensory, and perceptual systems affect the people-environment relationship. For example, when we study environmental perception we'll learn that our perceptual systems "habituate"-- that means get used to-- stimuli that are regular and predictable. That's why if you live by train tracks you probably don't notice the trains anymore-- you've gotten used to them, you've habituated. We'll also learn that the sharpness, the acuity, of your senses affect your experience of an environment. Our sensory system makes our experience of the physical environment different from that of a cat! When we study stress we'll learn that the human physiological stress response explains some of the health impacts of environmental stressors. Throughout our course we'll also see that our evolutionary history and our desire for self-preservation influences the person-environment relationship. For instance, our evolutionary history is relevant to understanding personal space, territoriality, and why natural environments are typically more restorative than built ones. We are biological beings but we are also social beings. We are social animals and our social and interpersonal dynamics add another layer to the people-environment relationship. So, for example, a high density space with your friends doesn't feel crowded but that same space filled with strangers would. When we study personal space we'll learn that the closeness of the relationship affects personal space zones, that is, the physical space that we maintain between ourselves and another person. Here's another example. People claim physical spaces-- that's what territories are-- and who they allow in and how they respond to territorial invasions depends on who it is and our relationship with them. Soon we'll be studying environmental risk perception and we'll learn that what our "tribe" thinks influences our perceptions of danger.
Now the second feature is that environmental psychologists use a variety of mostly applied research methods. Now that's a little bit different from most other areas of psychology which are more likely to rely on the laboratory experiment. Sometimes environmental psychologists do conduct laboratory experiments for sure, and we'll talk about some of those throughout the quarter. And there's some good reasons for that, as we'll talk about. But environmental psychologists generally favor more applied research methods and more field research-- that means research in the real world-- in contrast to research in the laboratory. And this all has to do with that whole holistic business, you know. If you study people in the laboratory it's an artificially simplified environment. You usually, you know, you hold everything constant and then just systematically manipulate a few hypothesized causal variables. Environmental psychologists are much more interested in people's real-life relationships with the environment. Environmental psychology is a practical psychology and a practical psychology calls for applied research methods, it calls for field research so that we can see what people do in real-world environments so that we can study the person-environment relationship and all its complex glory. And that means using lots of different applied research methods. And so we'll see more correlational research. We'll see more survey research and we'll see more naturalistic observation-- that means observing people in real-world settings, than we will in most other subdisciplines of psychology.
Feature three: So first feature is that environmental psychology is holistic, the second feature is that it uses a variety of applied research methods, and the third feature is environmental psychology is interdisciplinary. So environmental psychology involves psychologists from lots of different psychology disciplines. Some developmental psychologists, some social psychologists, some sensation and perception people, even some organizational psychologists, some health psychologists, etc. Also, environmental psychologists draw on other areas of psychology in their work. Now interdisciplinary also means that not just psychologists are involved. Environmental psychology is influenced by and done by (to some extent) professionals and researchers from other areas of the social sciences, and also by architecture. There's a lot of overlap with environmental psychology and cultural anthropology, geography, medicine, and architecture, landscape architecture...Yeah, a lot of interdisciplinary stuff going on here.
I want to say a little bit about the current status of environmental psychology. Now I'm not going to lie to you. Environmental psychology is not considered a core psychology subdiscipline and it's not even taught at most colleges and universities. And there are relatively few straight-up environmental psychology degrees out there. Now that's the bad news; the good news is that many psychologists have environmental psychology as a secondary identity, myself included. I identify primarily as an applied social psychologist but environmental psychology is very important in some of the work that that I do and also in my training. I also want to say that several dozen colleges and universities in the United States and Canada and Europe do offer environmental psychology coursework or related coursework, concentrations, and degrees. So not a core area in psychology. But the good news is I think there's a more appreciation for environmental psychology than there has been in a very long time within the field of psychology because there's increasing recognition of just how relevant it is to some of the big problems facing us today, like climate change.
So let's talk a little bit about the history of environmental psychology. The roots of environmental psychology actually go deep into early 20th-century psychology. You will find some studies like in the 1920s, 1930s, that are on what would now be considered environmental psychology topics. Things like the effects of color on mood, the effects of lighting on productivity. In the 1940s, we see some theorizing that lays the theoretical roots of environmental psychology, in particular work by Kurt Lewin. He had a field theory of behavior suggesting that humans operate within a complex interconnected array of influences-- social ecological influences-- important to environmental psychology today. Roger Barker in the 1940s comes up with an ecological psychology. His notion was that many physical spaces, many physical settings, are "behavior settings" where there's a common sequence of behaviors performed there. There are particular roles and norms and even sort of physical design features that are common to certain types of environments. So this notion of behavior settings with behavior programs, and the thought too was that if you study those, that you can better design the physical environment to promote goal accomplishment.
Now in the 1950s, late 1950s in particular, you see some people starting to lay the groundwork for what will become some major topic areas in environmental psychology, and also developing the research methods that become common to environmental psychology. So you see the first sort of concerted focus on architecture and behavior. You see some privacy research...and the people that are working at this time, people like Proshansky, Somer, they are yeah laying that groundwork for environmental psychology.
Now it's not until the late 1960s that the seeds that were planted start to blossom. So we see the first PhD program in environmental psychology in 1968 at the City University of New York, for instance. We see the first journal of environmental psychology called Environment and Behavior. And it makes sense in some ways that environmental psychology blossoms at this time, the 1960s of course being a time of hope and change and more social altruistic values and these go into the 70s. Now the 70s is really the heyday for environmental psychology, those flowers really blossoming and we see more programs on environmental psychology, more psychologists working in the field. We see more development of the topics that become part of the environmental psychology stable. Yeah, very important times, that 70s.
Now unfortunately things slow down in the 1980s and I think that's partly because if the 70s were "groovy," than the 80s were "greedy," and those more social altruistic values that were driving the expansion of the field are now replaced by values that are more egoistic, more focused on making money and individualistic values-- you know, what's in it for me. Politically speaking too, we sort of see the devaluing of caring about the environment. So it is not so good. But there is still some good work being done, particularly in the area of environmental stress.
Now the 1990s. Things still sort of plugging along. By the end of the 90s, though, finally (!) people start thinking of, caring a little bit more about the environment, listening a little bit more to these alarms about climate change. So we start to see the field grow and also recognition of the importance of the natural environment to mental health. So we start to see growth here and a little bit of shifting too even within the field of environmental psychology. So that sort of continues in the new millennium and it's sort of where we're at now.
Let's talk about your mission in environmental psychology. And your mission is to make environmental psychology your own. I want you to think about environmental psychology in your everyday life and also as it applies to your profession. We want to hear what you have to say about psychology in your life and your future professional life. I want you to leave our class with some information that will help you promote human well-being and functioning in your present and in your future. I want you to become a keen observer of the physical environment and how it affects people and also how people's individual differences affect their experiences of environments. I want you to observe the environments in your life and think about how they could be better designed to promote human well-being. I want you to think about physical environments as not only causes of stress and health-harming, but also to think about the physical environment in terms of restoration. So we'll see, for example, that nature can be an agent of recovery from stress and cognitive fatigue. And finally, no matter what our topic is, I want you to engage with it and I want you to think deeply about it. I think we'll all agree that the best educational experiences are ones where we really think hard and deeply about the material. And the good news is environmental psychology is very relevant to your personal and professional life and I don't think you'll have any problem engaging with it.
So I can't wait to have a great quarter with you and your classmates! Until then, my friends, take care and be well.