Behavior And Environment

The papers comprising this second volume of Human Behavior and the Environment represent, as do their predecessors, a cross section of current work in the broad area of problems dealing with interrelation ships between the physical environment and human behavior, at both the individual and the aggregate levels. Considering the two volumes as a unit, we have included papers covering a broad spectrum of problems ranging from the theoretical to the applied, and from the disciplinary-based to the interdisciplinary and professional. Approxi mately half of the papers are written by psychologists, with the remainder coming, in part, from such other disciplines as sociology, geography, and from such diverse applied and professional fields as natural recreation, landscape architecture, urban planning, and opera tions research. The volumes thus provide an overview of work on current topical problems. Yet, as the field is developing, specialization is inevitably increasing apace, and the editors as well as the publisher have become convinced of the desirability for futu're volumes in this series to be organized along topical lines, with successive volumes devoted to different aspects of this rather sprawling field. Thus, Volume 3, currently in the planning stage, will be devoted exclusively to the interaction of children with the physical environment, considered from diverse viewpoints, again including authors from diverse fields of specialization.

This comprehensive, introductory text presents a unified view of human environment problems. Unlike most texts in the field that treat environmental psychology as a branch of psychology only, Environment and Behavior covers the topic from a cross-disciplinary nature. The book is more inclusive of all aspects of environmental studies and emphasizes the innovative thinking required to deal with environmental problems. The breadth of coverage offered by Environment and Behavior will enable the instructor to choose the focus for each particular course because it contains chapters on a variety of subject areas, including environmental engineering, biology, geography, architecture, evolutionary biology, sociology, clinical psychology, and gerontology. Environment and Behavior is a one-of-a-kind text with a unique style that will make it a must for all courses related to the environment, including urban studies and psychology.

The inception of this volume can be traced to a series of Environmental Psychology Colloquia presented at the University of California, Irvine, dur ing the spring of 1974. These colloquia were held in conjunction with Social Ecology 252, a graduate seminar on Man and the Environment. Although the eight colloquia covered a wide range of topics and exemplified a diversity of research techniques, they seemed to converge on some common theoretical and methodological assumptions about the na ture of environment-behavioral research. The apparent continuities among these colloquia suggested the utility of developing a manuscript that would provide a historical overview of research on environment and be havior, a representation of its major concerns, and an analysis of its concep tual and empirical trends. Thus, expanded versions of the initial presen tations were integrated with a supplemental set of invited manuscripts to yield the present volume of original contributions by leading researchers in the areas of ecological and environmental psychology.

The theme of the present volume concerns people' s response to the natural environment, considered at scales varying from that of a house hold plant to that of vast wilderness areas. Our decision to focus on this particular segment of the physical environment was prompted in part by the intrinsic interest in this subject on the part of a diverse group of sodal scientists and professionals-and of laypersons, for that matter and in part by the relative neglect of this topic in standard treatments of the environment-behavior field. It also serves to bring out once again the interdisdplinary nature of that field, and we are pleased to have been able to inc1ude representatives from geography, sodology, soda! ecology, and natural recreation among our contributors. We believe that this volume will serve a useful purpose in helping to integrate the find ings and concepts in this presently somewhat fragmented field, scat tered as they are over a very diverse array of publications representing a similarly varied group of spedalties. It is hoped that the result will be to stimulate future development of this area and to add a measure of in creased coherence to it. Volume 7 of our series will be devoted to the theme of elderly people and the environment, with M. Powell Lawton joining us as guest co-editor. The titles of the papers comprising Volume 7 are shown on page v. Irwin Altman J oachim F. Wohlwill ix Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This is the first in a series of volumes concerned with research encompassed by the rather broad term "environment and behavior. " The goal of the series is to begin the process of integration of knowledge on environmental and behavioral topics so that researchers and professionals can have material from diverse sources accessible in a single publication. The field of environment and behavior is broad and interdiscipli nary, with researchers drawn from a variety of traditional disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, and other social and behavioral sciences, and from the biological and life sciences of medicine, psychiatry, biology, and ethology. The interdis ciplinary quality of the field is also reflected in the extensive involve ment of environmental professionals from architecture, urban plan ning, landscape architecture, interior design, and other fields such as recreation and natural resources, to name just a few. At present, the field has a somewhat chaotic flavor, with research being carried out by a variety of scholars who publish in a multitude of outlets. Many researchers and practitioners are unaware of the state of knowledge regarding a specific topic because of the unavailability of integrated reference materials. There are only a handful of books dealing with environment and behavior, most of them unintegrated collections of readings, with only an occasional systematic analysis of some facet of the field.

This eleventh volume in the series departs from the pattern of earlier volumes. Some of those volumes addressed research, design, and policy topics in terms of environmental settings, for example, homes, communities, neighborhoods, and public places. Others focused on environmental users, for example, chil dren and the elderly. The present volume examines the field of environment and behavior studies itself in the form of intellectual histories of some of its most productive and still visible senior participants. In so doing we hope to provide readers with a grand sweep of the field-its research and design content, methodology, institutions, and past and future trajectories-through the experiences and intellectual histories of its participants. Why intellectual histories? Several factors led to the decision to launch this project. For one, 1989 was an anniversary and commemorative year for the Environmental Design Research Association, perhaps the major and most long-standing interdisciplinary organization of environment and behavior re searchers and practitioners. Established in 1969, this organization has been the vehicle for generations of researchers and practitioners from many disciplines to come together annually to exchange ideas, present papers, and develop professional and personal relationships. It held its first and twentieth meetings in North Carolina, with the twentieth conference substantially devoted to dis cussions of the past, present, and future of the field-a taking stock, so to speak. Thus it seemed appropriate to launch a volume on intellectual histories at this significant juncture in the life of the field.

Active researchers in the areas of geography and psychology have contributed to this book. Both fields are capable of increasing our scientific knowledge of how human behavior is interfaced with the molar physical environment. Such knowledge is essential for the solution of many of today's most urgent environmental problems. Failure to constrain use of scarce resources, pollution due to human activities, creation of technological hazards and deteriorating urban quality due to vandalism and crime are all well known examples. The influence of psychology in geographical research has long been appreciated but it is only recently that psychologists have recognized they have something to learn from geography. In identifying the importance of two-way interdisciplinary communication, a psychologist and a geographer have been invited to each write a chapter in this book on a designated topic so that close comparisons can be drawn as to how the two disciplines approach the same difficulties. Since the disciplines are to some extent complementary, it is hoped that this close collaboration will have synergistic effects on the attempts of both to find solutions to environmental problems through an increased understanding of the many behavior-environment interfaces.

Increasingly it is being recognized that consumer behavior may be a key trigger in the march toward sustainable development. Several lines of psychological theory and approaches have been developed relatively independently, each of which may provide major implications and action points on how consumers might be moved toward more sustainable behavior. This book is the first that brings together this variety of perspectives and theoretical angles around the common ambition of sustainable development. The contributors are all leading social scientists in the field of consumer behavior who met the challenge to sketch out their theoretical perspectives, but also to go beyond their normal theorizing and think out of the box in order to show how these theoretical perspectives might be made actionable in terms of key managerial and policy perspectives toward sustainable development. The result is a book that shows a wealth of information and approaches the question of how to encourage sustainable behavior from a myriad of divergent perspectives. This should stimulate scientists and policy-makers alike to find similarities, differences, and synergies between state-of-the-art psychological thinking about how to most effectively stimulate sustainable consumer behavior.