Psych 372 Environmental Psychology (1 intro)

8/11/2019 Psych 372 Environmental Psychology (1 intro)

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Environmental PsychologyPsychology 372



Introduction

• Who am I?

• What is this all about?

• The fine print



Introduction

• The obligatory bio

• I’m a crossover from a neuroscience background

• This matters for this course because it means that I know some areas of environmental psythan others

• I do a lot of different kinds of research, some of which I will tell you about

• Residential design

• Urban design, stress, physiology

• Restorative effects of nature

• I’m a keen advocate of knowledge mobilization

• Which basically means I like to talk to a wide range of audiences about my work and I like thas real-world application (which is one of the reasons I turned to enviro-psych)

• You can follow me on twitter (@whereaminow) or look at my personal website (colinellard.cto know more about what I’ve done and what I’m doing.



What is environmental psychology?

• The interdisciplinary study of the relationship between environment and hum

• There’s lots of overlap with other disciplines (which is both boon and bane!)

• Urban planning

• Architecture

• Landscape architecture

• Human geography



A smidgen of history

• You’ll care more about history later on, but here’s a little bit of context

• Egon Brunswik

• Sometimes named as the founder of the field, though not the “namer ” of thefield

• Argued that we had to take into account the setting of a relationship tounderstand it

• His theory of “probabilistic functionalism” argued that, just as we had to sample

from a number of individuals to establish a law, we also had to sample from anumber of settings

• In an experiment that was decades ahead of its t ime, he showed that rats in a simple T-mazecould learn even when correct choices were probabilistic

• Things ended badly for Brunswik though his influence has lived on



A smidgen more history

• Kurt Lewin

• Generally known as the founder of social psychology

• But Lewin’s famous “equation”

B=f(P, E)

Made explicit the setting or context of an event asa predictor of behaviour (in contrast to thetheories of the day that laid heavy emphasis onpersonal history as a predictor of behaviour)

• Lewin was mostly concerned with interpersonalbehaviour, but his equation can easily be consideredgeneralizable to physical settings as well



Environmental psychology lifts off….

• Roger Barker

• A student of Kurt Lewin

• Went to town (literally) on the relationship between place and behaviour

• Set up a lab station in Oskaloosa Kansas

• First work was a compendious description of a day in the life of a boy

• Focused on behavioural settings

• Two boys in math class are more similar than a boy in math class and a boy at recess

• Identified over 800 behavioural settings in a town of 1000 people



One Boy’s Day

7:00. Mrs Birch said with pleasant casualness,

“Raymond wake up.” With a little more urgency inher voice she spoke again: “son, are you going toschool today?”

7:01. Raymond picked up a sock and began tuggingand pulling it on his left foot. As his mother watchedhim she said kiddingly, “Can’t you get your peepersopen?”…He said plaintively, “Mommie,” andcontinued mumbling in an unintelligible waysomething about his undershirt.

9:52. Using his thumb and forefinger and dropping his jaw, he tried to press his cheeks together so thatthey would meet between his teeth. He exertedmuch effort in the attempt.



More recently….

• Popularity of environmental psychology in university curricula has waned in r

• In part this was because the wide interdisciplinary nature of env psych made it difficother areas

• In part, the ascendancy of neuroscience was to blame

• In part, the absence of a small number of compelling and overarching theories



Most recently…

• A resurgence of interest driven by:

• Urgent practical problems

• How do we deal with global urbanization?

• How do we influence environmental attitudes?

• Methodological developments

• New tools for simulation

• New tools for geo-tracking

• Widespread public interest in “quantified self” and crowd-sourcing data for personal use



A few notes on the syllabus

• Best way to contact me or the ta’s is via email

• Assessment is a midterm (February 26), a final exam (exam period), and twoassignments (due February 15 and March 15) that will involve the collection

• Weekly check-ins are a painless way to rack up a few points and also to encostay engaged with the course

• You should do the check-in assignment soon after the relevant class

• You can also get a few points by participating in experiments• Remember to check the website!

• The syllabus will guide your required reading but I will also post the occasionenrichment material. You’re not explicitly responsible for this but it will help yunderstand and enjoy some of the material



For next class

• Go out into the world either alone or with a partner (someone from this class

• Pick a public place

• It’s going to be cold so you could use this to make things interesting or you could avan indoor setting

• Sit or stand quietly for 30 minutes and observe, observe, observe

• Don’t talk to anyone or bother anyone! Be as invisible as you can be.

• Make notes! Count things! Be creative about what you measure!

• See if you can identify a problem in the place you’ve chosen and collect somdescribes the problem.

• Bring your findings to class to discuss.

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Psych 372 Environmental Psychology (1 intro)