Environmental Psychology, Overview

Transcription

1 a0005 Environmental Psychology, Overview Mirilia Bonnes and Giuseppe Carrus University of Rome La Sapienza, Rome, Italy 1. The Historical and Conceptual Backgrounds of Environmental Psychology 2. The Main Areas of Interest of Current Environmental Psychology 3. The Future of Environmental Psychology Further Reading GLOSSARY affordances Characteristics of environmental objects that are related to both their physical properties and the possible actions that each perceiver can perform with them. conservation behaviors Actions that contribute to environmental preservation and/or conservation. environmental stressors Physical characteristics of the environment that produce stress. Hawthorne effect An increase in work productivity deriving from a worker s awareness of being monitored by an external observer. participatory governance The transfer of authority and responsibility from those who hold power by virtue of law, contract, or organizational role to those not so empowered. personal space The emotionally tinged zone around the human body that people feel is their space. place The product of physical properties of the environment, people s cognitions of the environment, and people s actions in the environment. place attachment An affective bond between an individual and a particular place that is not interchangeable with another with the same functional quality. privacy regulation The selective control of access to the self or to one s group. residential satisfaction The experience of pleasure or gratification deriving from living in a specific place. restoration The process of renewing, recovering, or reestablishing physical, psychological, and social resources or capabilities diminished in ongoing efforts to meet adaptive demands. social dilemma A situation of intrinsic conflict between the pursuing of individual gains and the maximization of collective outcomes. spatial cognition The internalized reflection and reconstruction of space in thought. sustainable development Development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising those of the future. territory A fixed geographical space marked and defended by an organism and used for life-sustaining activities. Environmental psychology is that branch of psychology that studies the relationship between people and the sociophysical features of the built and natural environment, in order to enhance human wellbeing and to improve people environment relations. It emerged as an autonomous field of scientific inquiry at the end of the 1950s and during the 1960s. The main Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology, 801 #2004 Elsevier Inc. VOLUME 1 All rights reserved.

2 802 Environmental Psychology, Overview conceptual roots of environmental psychology can be found in various theoretical proposals within psychology, all of them underlining the ecological or transactional basis and the context-specificity of human psychological processes. The emergence of environmental psychology is also related to the need for responding to specific demands from other technical and disciplinary fields, such as architecture and natural-ecological science, that face the problem of designing and managing the physical features of people s everyday environments. Due to the influence of these different factors, present-day environmental psychology can be characterized by four distinctive aspects: (1) the attention paid to the physical characteristics of the environment where human behavior occurs; (2) the wide variety of the research methods adopted; (3) the interest in problems with a clear social relevance; and (4) the interdisciplinary collaboration with other environmental fields. The first part of this article briefly outlines the basic historical and conceptual backgrounds of environmental psychology as a scientific discipline. Then, the main areas of interest and the related outcomes of current environmental psychology are briefly reviewed. (These aspects will be more thoroughly discussed within each of the single articles included in the present section.) Finally, perspectives on the future developments of environmental psychology are summarized. environment, particularly when the built-up physical environment was considered. On the other hand, human behavior was conceived of as a cause of the physical environment, particularly when the natural environment was considered. However, this distinction was increasingly overcome by environmental psychology s growing emphasis on the necessity of adopting a transactional approach in the study of person environment relationships. This approach lead to the person-in-place as the main unit of analysis for environmental psychological inquiry. Various converging factors, originating inside, around, and outside the psychological field, contributed to the emergence and development of environmental psychology. The origin, the past, and the present of this branch of psychology can be better understood by looking at all these factors in order to outline a disciplinary identity that goes beyond the general label of applied psychology. Because of the influence of these different factors, present-day environmental psychology can be characterized by four distinctive aspects: the attention paid to the physical characteristics of the environment in which human behavior occurs; the wide variety of the research methods adopted; the specific interest in problems with a clear social relevance, and the adoption of interdisciplinary collaboration practices with other environmental fields devoted to the design and management of our everyday life environment. s THE HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUNDS OF ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY The starting date of environmental psychology as an autonomous disciplinary field within psychological science is commonly placed at the end of the 1950s. The environmental psychology that was formed during the 1950s and 1960s focused its attention on the physical features of the environment in which human behavior occurs. Its aim was to better understand the relationship between human behavior and the everyday physical or sociophysical environment. This environment was considered to be directly perceptible through the sensory organs, and was defined and considered in spatial and physical terms, whether built or natural, or on a small or large scale. At that time, there were two contrasting ideas about the relationship between human behavior and the physical environment. On the one hand, human behavior was conceived of as the result of the physical 1.1. Environmental Psychology within and around the Psychological Tradition Psychology has been traditionally interested in environment behavior interactions in a very general way. The major interest of environmental psychology rested on the discovery of the importance of the physical and spatial dimension of the environment as a constituting part of human actions and experience. This interest emerged within a wider ecological or transactional perspective coming from various domains of psychological inquiry. Therefore, environmental psychology has always been concerned for the spatial-physical properties of the surroundings in which human behavior occurs, that is, of its physical setting. At the same time, it stressed the importance of considering these physical properties in a molar rather than molecular sense. It is also important to stress that the influence of the physical environment on human psychological processes often remains outside our individual and collective awareness. s0010

3 Environmental Psychology, Overview 803 Some pioneering studies in psychology highlighted the importance of the physical and spatial context in shaping human behavior, albeit often as an incidental outcome or a small part of other research aims. An example is the widely cited field experiments, conduced at the Western Electric Company by Elton Mayo in the 1930s, that investigated the effects of the lighting conditions in work settings upon workers performance. Other pioneering works are the studies on the development of social influence networks by Leon Festinger and colleagues and the analysis of the stream of human behavior in natural settings by Roger Barker and colleagues. All of these earlier contributions were guided by a common methodological interest in studying human behavior in its natural setting, as researchers recognized the need for overcoming the usually low external validity of the traditional laboratory experiments. To this end, they preferred methods such as field experiments or non-obtrusive observation. Other authors also played a crucial role in the emergence of environmental psychology, especially those who were more open to receive and develop ideas coming from areas that bordered on psychology, but that were traditionally interested in studying behavior in natural contexts. Areas such as cultural anthropology, about human proxemics, animal ethology, and microsociology are some examples. In other words, in order to be concerned with the spatial-physical environment, psychology had to get out from its habitual setting (i.e., the research laboratory), which was by definition a non-environment. Just like as the earlier pioneers mentioned previously, these contributors also were generally opposed to the laboratory methods used by mainstream psychological research, and consequently were more willing to use other methodologies such as field experiments and field observations, both natural or systematic. R. Sommer and I. Altman s studies on personal space and social behavior, which remain as cornerstones of the early environmental psychology, are good examples. The enthusiasm over the emergence of this new field of inquiry was then linked with the previously mentioned dissatisfaction for both the poor ecological validity and the low social relevance of much laboratory research. This resulted in a search for a real world psychology. This frequent dissatisfaction can be traced to the various forms of ecological demand raised since the 1940s and 1950s by various authors and psychological schools, which later developed into what has been called contextualism or contextual revolution. This revolution is certainly at the core of the development of environmental psychology, particularly in its transactional-contextual approach, which has characterized environmental psychology since its beginning. Initially, the increased awareness of the crucial effect played by the physical features of the everyday environment on human behavior was based on two main theoretical psychological traditions. The first is the psychology of perception, especially in its more ecological orientations, such as the lens model by E. Brunswik, the transactional school of the Princeton group, and the ecological approach to perception of J. Gibson. Gibson, for example, introduced the neologism affordances, which identifies the physical properties of environmental objects that are related to the possible actions that can be performed with them. The second psychological tradition is based on the social psychology approach, through the pioneering work of K. Lewin, E. Tolman, R. Barker, and U. Bronfenbrenner. It embraces a more holistic or molar perspective, which later developed into the transactional-contextual approach to person environment relationships, as systematically outlined by many contributors to the first Handbook of Environmental Psychology edited in 1987 by D. Stokols and I. Altman. In this perspective, the physical environment or physical setting has been increasingly considered as a sociophysical environment, with a growing emphasis on the social aspects of both the physical environment and the psychological processes involved. The notion of place, and its related environmental-psychological processes, also became a central unit of analysis for many environmental psychologists. Typically, places were defined from an environmental psychology point of view as a product of three main dimensions: physical properties, people s cognitions, and people s actions Environmental Psychology and Other Environmental Fields The problem-oriented demands rising in technical and disciplinary fields distant from psychology are also an important factor that contributed to the emerging of environmental psychology. Examples of these fields are architecture, engineering, urban planning, human geography, natural and ecological science. Typically, architects and engineers are concerned with problems regarding the relationships between people and the built or human-made environments. In contrast, geographers and natural scientists are more interested in the relationships between people and the natural features of the environment. s0015

4 804 Environmental Psychology, Overview s0020 In architecture and urban planning, those who were dissatisfied with an egocentric approach to design desired to move toward a user-centered approach to design, as well as to move from product design and planning to processes design and planning. A seminal work in this area is that of the urban planner Kevin Lynch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His famous book The Image of the City, published in 1960, is considered a cornerstone of the collaboration between urban planning and environmental psychology. Lynch proposed that the point of view or the image that users form of the urban environment should be kept in mind when designing and planning urban spaces. Likewise, in engineering and technology, many scholars and practitioners became interested in the human-use dimension of technological systems. The collaboration between psychology and architecture was mainly guided by an interest in the influence of specific and localized spatial characteristics of the built-up environment on human behavior. A different orientation, however, characterizes the interest in human behavior that arose in the fields of natural and ecological science, which is the other main external domain contributing to the establishment of environmental psychology. Here, the focus was placed on the possible (and usually negative) impact that human behavior can have upon the natural environment, at both a local and a global or biospheric level. Therefore the importance of paying attention to the human dimension considered at an individual, social and cultural level of global environmental changes, such as the greenhouse effect and climate changes, the loss of biodiversity, the depletion of the ozone layer, and so forth, was recognized. In parallel with the increasing relevance assumed by these environmental problems, ecologists also became increasingly aware of the need to integrate the natural and social sciences when dealing with environmental phenomena. The growing interests of current environmental psychology in topics such as environmental concern, pro-environmental values and attitudes, ecologically relevant behaviors, sustainable lifestyles, and natural resource management is also a consequence of this increased awareness. 2. THE MAIN AREAS OF INTEREST OF CURRENT ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY Contributions in environmental psychology can be grouped into five general domains: spatial behavior, environmental cognition, environmental stress and restoration, environmental assessment, and environmental concern and resource management. In this section of the article, the main empirical results and outcomes of environmental psychology are briefly introduced for each of these five domains. The various single articles composing this section provide a more exhaustive treatment of the different topics related to these five domains. The environmental psychological processes grouped into these five domains can be considered transverse to the variety of specific settings in everyday life. However, since environmental psychology has also been increasingly characterized by the adoption of a place-specific approach to people environment interactions, many environmental psychologists have been increasingly interested in a number of specific places that have a particular impact on everyday life and well-being, such as offices, schools, houses, stores, hospitals, museums, prisons, cities, etc. Three articles in this section focus on three particularly important places in our everyday experience: the workplace, the school, and the city Spatial Behavior The concept of spatial behavior relates to how individuals regulate and use (in terms of appropriation and defense) their spatial environments at different personal, interpersonal, and group levels. Environmental psychology interested in spatial behavior focuses on the role of the spatial properties of the environment in shaping and regulating social interaction in everyday situations. Four major environmental psychological concepts are considered in this field: territoriality, personal space, privacy, and crowding. The articles by R. Sommer and by C. Werner, B. Brown, and I. Altman review the relevant empirical findings of these domains of environmental psychology, as well as their implications for daily life. These domains encompass the variety of strategies by which people and communities set up and regulate the spatial boundaries of their living environment (territoriality) and the very personal sphere of the amount of space we put between us and the others (personal space). The concept of privacy encompasses both of these aspects, as it refers more generally to the various personal and group-based processes through which people set and control their mutual closeness in daily interactions. The article by R. Sommer thoroughly illustrates the concept of human territoriality. As Sommer outlines, territoriality is the spatial appropriation, marking, and defense of our living spaces. Following an evolutionary orientation, territories can be defined as those spatial s0025

5 Environmental Psychology, Overview 805 areas that deserve to be defended from external intruders. An intriguing issue connected with human territoriality is that of crime prevention, through the concept of defensible space. As the article describes, there is a widely documented negative correlation between the presence of physical and symbolic territorial markers (e.g., well-maintained dwellings, tended yards, signs of occupancy) and the likelihood of criminal intrusion and vandalism in residential areas. The relationship between the presence of markers and crime, however, may be mediated by social variables. Notably, clear territorial markers are related to stronger residential identification, place attachment, sense of community, and higher feelings of safety among residents. Thus, architectural defensive features might play an indirect role in reducing the likelihood of crime. They reflect and communicate strengthened community-based ties and greater social cohesion; these make potential intruders less willing to perpetrate criminal activities. Another important outcome of the concept of territoriality is related to urban planning. Sommer s article in fact points out how specific design features encouraging residents identification with and control over a specific territory may promote its proper maintenance. Furthermore, common areas such as urban parks or playgrounds should not be placed between the territories of rival gangs, as they would then run the risk of being abandoned and vandalized. Other domains in which the study of human territoriality has offered useful insights are sport (as sport teams perform better on their home field), police investigations (as many criminal gangs mark their territories by the use of graffiti and other symbols), and environmental conflict resolution (as the creation of ad hoc territories reserved to different stakeholders may prevent the emergence of land use disputes). A second article by R. Sommer illustrates the environmental psychological concept of personal space. As opposed to territoriality, which is a place-based or sitebased concept, personal space is a person-related, and thus trans-place, concept. In his seminal studies in this field, Sommer defined personal space as that emotionally tinged area that people desire to maintain around themselves and that they feel is their space. Sommer s article also provides a review of the various individual, situational, group, and cultural factors regulating personal space. As this article reveals, personal space has relevant implications for several domains of human environment interaction. For example, the personal space concept has provided insights for the design of institutional settings with fixed seating, as well as in the domain of mass transportation. Likewise, issues regarding personal space were incorporated in the design of public or semi-public settings (e.g., offices, stores, banks). These should be set up in order to provide spaces that leave the users as free as possible to shift among different degrees of desired mutual closeness. Many guidebooks describing the appropriate spacing in different social encounters are also available. For example, salesman are trained about how their selling activities might profit from an appropriate spatial interaction with customers. Finally, the issue of personal space has serious implications for the legal field: for example, the invasion of personal space has been an issue in court cases concerning prison crowding and sexual harassment. It is also an aspect considered during jury selection in high-profile trials, where professional consultants advise lawyers in order to detect potentially biased jurors. Personal space and territoriality are both involved in the more general concept of privacy regulation. In this sense, they can be seen as two different strategies that people use to regulate their privacy, and through which people strive for psychologically satisfactory level of openness or closedness to others. A seminal contribution to the definition of privacy in environmental psychology comes from I. Altman. Within this section, the reader will find a detailed presentation about the psychological mechanisms of privacy regulation in the article written byc.werner,b.brown,andi.altman.astheyreport, privacy regulation is defined as the process of selectively controlling access to one s self or group. In their article, Werner et al. underline how environmental psychology treats privacy as a dialectic process: that is, people might avoid or seek social contact, depending on the specific situation they are in. An important point is that individuals feel more comfortable when allowed to be as open or as closed to the others as they desire. This is also related to another important issue in the environmental psychology of spatial behavior, that is, crowding. As reported by Werner et al. in their article, crowding can be defined as one s perception that there are too many people present in a given situation. The possibility of a proper privacy regulation therefore becomes very important when people experience crowding. Environmental psychology has also treated crowding as a specific environmental stressor. The article of Werner, Brown, and Altman also refers to how environmental psychology has identified a number of physical features that either allow people to experience a satisfactory regulation of privacy or do not. As a consequence, the privacy concept has many practical implications for the design of various specific environments such as workplaces, schools, prisons,

6 806 Environmental Psychology, Overview s0030 hospitals, and public residences. For example, university dormitories designed as suites or apartments can promote the formation of small subgroups of occupants; this is meant to buffer the possible negative consequences of crowding upon the possibility of privacy regulation. When designing the layout of a home, architects should place rooms that are usually considered more private (e.g., the bedrooms, or the family bathrooms) far from the entrance. Likewise, privacy-related concepts have been applied to urban planning and community development. The article illustrates how, for example, public spaces provided with design features encouraging interpersonal contacts (e.g., streets that invite walking, tree-shaded streets, low speed limits, green areas) might be used to promote strengthened community bonds and social ties among neighbors. Beyond the effect that specific design features can have in affording or impeding people s mutual interactions, a central factor in people s satisfaction or dissatisfaction with privacy conditions is the possibility of regulation and control. A general recommendation is that the physical environment should be designed in order to provide to its users the possibility of regulating privacy, by seeking or avoiding social contact according to their situational and personal needs and desires Environmental Cognition and Cognitive Mapping Since its beginning, environmental psychology has focused on the relationship between cognitive processes and physical space. The article of R. Golledge on spatial cognition thoroughly reviews this area of study. As Golledge notes, spatial cognition is a multidisciplinary area involving psychological science (e.g., cognitive and developmental psychology, neuropsychology) as well as other disciplinary and technical fields (e.g., geography, anthropology, architecture and urban planning, computer science). A core concept in the environmental psychology of spatial cognition has been cognitive mapping. The term cognitive mapping refers to the process of mentally acquiring, representing, storing, and using information about the spatial properties of the physical surroundings and the relations among its constitutive elements. The interest in cognitive maps in psychology can be traced back to the works of E. Tolman in Studies on cognitive mapping have focused on the different kinds of information people rely on when forming a map of a given spatial setting. Studies on cognitive mapping have dealt with the representation of large-scale urban environments, as well as with the representation of the interior of buildings. One goal of this kind of research was to investigate how to aid people s orientation, memory of places, and wayfinding in complex environments. Kevin Lynch s seminal book The Image of the City influenced several ensuing works on the formation of mental maps of urban settings. Urban planners can use principles highlighted by these studies in order to design urban spaces that are capable of facilitating people s orientation in the city. For example, some spatial features of the residential environment, such as spatial prominence, sharp contours of buildings, easy accessibility, and the presence of natural surroundings might facilitate the overall comprehension and use of neighborhoods. Likewise, principles drawn from the cognitive mapping literature have been used for aiding wayfinding in complex interior structures, such as university buildings, hospitals, or museums. The presence of proper signs (floor plans, large graphic aids) and the availability of visual accesses may be effective in enhancing users proper orientation. As Golledge points out in his article, there is now a particular interest in the study of spatial cognition in aged people. The increased trend of aging in western societies has in fact led to an increased concern for the quality of life of older people. Research in this field is therefore being devoted to trying to identify how the layout of the physical space can be designed and managed in order to buffer the declines in spatial competence associated with aging, and the negative consequences of this decline for the safety, effectiveness, and autonomy of the elderly Environmental Stress and Restorative Environments The environment in which most of humankind currently lives is often characterized by the presence of several potentially adverse physical conditions that can be a chronic, powerful, and uncontrollable source of psychological distress. The article by G. Evans and S. Cohen on environmental stress, included in this section, provides an exhaustive review of this traditional area of study of environmental psychology. Environmental stressors can be defined as those actual or perceived adverse properties of the physical environment that are capable of producing a negative (physiologically and psychologically costly) effect s0035

7 Environmental Psychology, Overview 807 upon a person. It is important to note that one s everyday environment is often a source of simultaneous and interdependent multiple stressors. The article by Evans and Cohen addresses this particular aspect of environmental stress. The effects of different environmental stressors frequently add or interact with each other. As Evans and Cohen outline, individuals must make a remarkable adaptive effort in order to cope with such adverse conditions. Because humans have great powers of adaptation in adopting strategies to cope with stressors, the coping activity may become a stressful condition itself, particularly in the long-term. The article focuses on the four main costs of adapting to poor environmental conditions: cumulative fatigue, learned helplessness, physiological mobilization, and overgeneralization. These adaptive costs are caused by chronic exposure to a number of different environmental stressors, such as crowding, noise, or pollution. Some of these main environmental stressors can be a very common experience for a great number of people, in particular for residents of cities. Conversely, there are other critical environmental conditions that are very uncommon that are also of interest to environmental psychologists. The article by R. Bechtel on extreme environments and mental function elaborates on this issue. As Bechtel points out, there are two principal classifications of extreme environments. On the one hand, there are permanent extreme environments, such as high mountains, deserts, cold regions, and jungles, and on the other hand, there are temporary extreme environments, such as Antarctic polar stations, space shuttles, and simulation laboratories. The main goal of environmental psychology concerned with extreme environments is to better understand how human mental function and behavior can be affected by these kinds of environmental conditions in order to buffer their potentially negative impact on mental function: that is, how to make these environments less extreme for their users. In recent decades, environmental psychology has also addressed stress-related issues from an opposite viewpoint: that is, how the physical environment can restore human mental functions, and therefore promote psychological well-being. The article by T. Hartig on restorative environments provides an exhaustive review of this promising literature. As the article explains, restorative environments are those that not only permit, but promote, restoration, where restoration is defined as the process of recovering physical, psychological, and social resources being diminished by efforts to adapt to external demands. In his article, Hartig reports how a considerable amount of empirical research has demonstrated the existence of specific environmental conditions capable of positively affecting people s feelings of well-being, although different theoretical elaborations have been proposed to explain it. Perhaps the most welldocumented effect within this area of research is that natural settings appear to be more restorative than builtup ones, because they stimulate people s interest and provide people with the possibility of being away from their usual experience. Furthermore, natural environments are highly restorative because of various specific features, such as visual depth and visual complexity. Research on restorative environments can have a high relevance for the design of health care structures. A widely cited study by R. Ulrich, published in Science in 1984, showed for example that providing hospital patients with the possibility of contact with nature (even just visual contact) might positively impact the effects of medical therapies. Restorativeness is a relevant issue for the domain of urban planning as well. Setting up urban green areas that are easily accessible to urban dwellers can provide them with more frequent opportunities for psychological restoration in a highly stressful environment such as the city Environmental Assessment Although a theoretical and conceptual distinction between environmental assessment and environmental appraisal has been proposed, the former being more place-centered, the latter being more person-centered, here both of these aspects of assessment are considered. Environmental psychology interested in environmental assessment has encompassed a large amount of empirical contributions and theoretical models aimed at answering very important questions. For example, how do people evaluate, judge, or express preference for different kinds of environments? How do the physical features of a setting interact with people s personal and social characteristics when they evaluate an environment? In particular, which physical properties of the environment are related to positive evaluations and which are related to negative ones? Furthermore, what are the individual and group differences that may lead to differing environmental evaluations? And also, how do cognitive and affective judgments interact when a certain environmental scene is evaluated? Generally speaking, different affective qualities have been found to characterize different environments. These qualities vary according to two main bipolar axes, pleasure (pleasant/unpleasant) and arousal (high/ low). The physical surroundings of people s everyday s0040

8 808 Environmental Psychology, Overview lives can generate positive or negative emotions in terms of the pleasure they afford to the perceiver, or in terms of the amount of arousal they provide to the perceiver. According to a more cognitive model proposed by R. and S. Kaplan, there are four main physical characteristics predicting the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an environmental setting: coherence, complexity, legibility, and mystery. Coherence and complexity are two features of environmental scenes that immediately strike the perceiver. Conversely, legibility and mystery are two features that can be inferred after viewing an environmental scene for more time. The Kaplans model also offered interesting insights into the study of landscape preference. Whether a setting will generate positive or negative emotions in its users/perceivers is also a function of the prior state of the perceiver him- or herself. People s affective appraisal of a given environment is an adaptive process, in the sense that it is a function of both the properties of the environment and the characteristics of the perceiver. For example, high sensation seekers prefer highly arousing environmental scenes, and vice versa. Several studies have also showed that natural environments are usually preferred to built environments by a large number of subjects. This preference seems to be consistent across different cultures, genders, ages, and so forth. Regardless if they are evaluated in terms of general preference, aesthetic beauty, or perceived restorativeness, natural landscapes are judged more positively than built settings. The presence of water in an environment is also positively judged. Moreover, as previously mentioned, exposure to natural views has been proved to have positive effects upon physiological and cognitive indicators, such as the rapidity of healing after hospitalization and the relief of mental fatigue. Such a nature favoritism, or biophilia, has been explained in evolutionary terms: people are still attracted by nature because it provided sources of sustenance and shelter in the earlier stages of human evolution. The psychological benefits of contact with nature can be due to the fact that evolution favored those who could benefit more from exposure to nature. Despite this apparently generalized nature favoritism, a limited degree of human intervention within a natural environment is associated with positive evaluations. That is, scenes in which the human presence is visible (although not too intrusive) are usually preferred to scenes of total wilderness. This leads to the importance of another factor in shaping environmental evaluations, perceived control. People tend to judge more positively those environments that they perceive as controllable, compared to those that they perceive as uncontrollable. Typically, the perception of control is associated with higher perceived safety. Speaking more generally, environmental evaluation could be conceived of as a function of the perceived cognitive, affective, and behavioral fit between the characteristics of the person (e.g., needs, goals, values, expectations) and the actual physical properties of the environment. In other words, people will prefer those environments they see as matching their needs, goals, and expectancies in that specific context at that given time. The processes driving environmental assessments are relevant for the study of residential preference and satisfaction. The article written by M.V. Giuliani on residential preference and attachment across the lifespan, and the article by M. Bonaiuto on residential satisfaction and perceived residential environment quality, both included in this section, specifically deal with these issues. As both Giuliani and Bonaiuto describe in their articles, residential preference and satisfaction are multidimensional processes, given the tendency of people to combine different aspects when judging the quality of a residential setting. At a macro-level (e.g., the neighborhood) these aspects are related to (1) the physical and aesthetic characteristics of residential areas, (2) the social relations that people can establish in a specific residential area, and (3) the actions and behaviors that people can perform in a specific residential area. At a micro-level (e.g., the home) these aspects are related to (1) the quality of the interior arrangement and decoration of the house, (2) the specific architectural style of the house, and (3) the location of the house, in terms of both proximity to functional services and distance form the city center. An important outcome of studies on environmental assessment has been the development of psychometric tools for the measurement of environmental preference and satisfaction, such as perceived environmental quality indicators (PEQIs). Because environmental quality assessment is conceived as a multi-dimensional process, PEQIs should encompass a sufficient variety of dimensions: the most widely shared qualities are aesthetics, functionality, safety, social relations, noise and pollution, and green spaces. The information gathered through these tools can often represent the first step in developing more inclusive and participatory methods in environmental design and planning. Why is including users perspectives or letting people take part in decisions considered so important in the environmental domain, as well as in many other domains? The article by A. Churchman and E. Sadan on participation in environmental design and planning thoroughly illustrates this issue. As Churchman and

9 Environmental Psychology, Overview 809 s0045 Sadan outline, the major argument in favor of public participation is that it enables decisions that better fit the needs of the people. The positive consequences of this better fit are twofold, as both public support for environmental policies and people s care for a proper maintenance of their environments will be more likely. Nonetheless, Churchman and Sadan also identify and discuss a number of factors that may bedevil the effective implementation of participatory processes in the environmental domain. For example, public leaders and politicians sometimes see participation as a threat to their power. It is important to outline here how this article presents various arguments that support the crucial role of environmental psychology in promoting and improving participatory processes in environmental design, planning, and management. This aspect is particularly relevant, as it relates to the issue of improving the processes of inclusive environmental governance, which is currently seen as a crucial goal by many international and intergovernmental authorities Environmental Concern, Environmentally Friendly Behaviors, and Natural Resources A shared belief among the scientific community and among public opinion is that the quality of our environment at the local and global level has rapidly decreased almost everywhere in the last decades. As a matter of fact, the major reason for that progressive and often dramatic deterioration is the impact of many human activities and rapid industrial growth on the ecosystems. Therefore, the healthy or unhealthy state of the environment primarily depends, and will depend in the future, on those human activities that can cause relevant and often irreversible environmental local and global changes. In order to deal with these kind of problems, environmental psychology has increasingly addressed the issue of environmental concern in the last two decades. Two articles included in this section illustrate this important area of interest in present-day environmental psychology. In his analysis of conservation behavior, F. Kaiser focuses on the psychological factors at the basis of the actions contributing to environmental preservation. As Kaiser suggests, people s conservation behaviors can be approached from two rather different perspectives. Conservation behavior, in fact, can be defined either from an observer s or from an actor s viewpoint. The first implies a focus on the consequences for the environment and considers apparently similar actions (e.g., recycling paper and recycling used batteries) as distinct behaviors. The second perspective focuses more directly on the human motivations driving conservation behaviors and groups even apparently different actions (e.g., recycling glass and owning solar panels) into the same behavioral category. Kaiser s article also illustrates how this second approach is more directly linked to a psychological perspective. On the contrary, a too strict focus on environmental consequences may lead to underestimating the psychological determinants of conservation actions. But what are the psychological determinants of environmentally friendly behaviors? The article by H. Staats on pro-environmental attitudes and behavioral change deals more directly with this question. In particular, this article focuses on the relationship between environmentally friendly attitudes and behaviors: that is, the congruence or incongruence between what people believe and feel and how they behave toward the environment. Pro-environmental attitudes are increasingly shared by many people in western societies. Some social structural variables (e.g., age, gender, level of education, place of residence, political orientation) appear to be related with this concern. Typically, young, female, highly educated, urban, and liberally oriented subjects express a stronger concern for the environment. The increased concern for environmental issues has been summed up by the concept, introduced by R. Dunlap and K. Van Liere at the end of the 1970s, of a new environmental paradigm (NEP). The core idea of NEP is that an increased number of people are developing a new perspective toward the environment, based on the belief that the state of the earth s ecosystems is becoming more and more precarious, therefore compromising human survival. However, people often do not coherently translate such a positive concern into consequent pro-environmental behaviors. The reason for this lack of correspondence has been explained in different ways. Staats article guides the reader through two important social psychological models of attitude-behavior relations: the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the theory of planned behavior (TPB). As Staats points out, the basic tenet of these models is that the relation between attitudes and behaviors is mediated or moderated by other variables, such as behavioral intentions and perceived behavioral control. TRA and TPB have been applied, sometimes successfully and other times less successfully, to several environmentally relevant behavioral domains, such as waste recycling, travel modes, water use, energy use, and green consumerism.

10 810 Environmental Psychology, Overview At any rate, the role of variables other than attitudes seems to be crucial for explaining pro-environmental actions: among them there are past behaviors and habits, environmental knowledge, social and personal norms, and value orientations. Well-established habits are often difficult to quit, even when their performers are aware of the possible negative consequences for the environment. Likewise, a lack of specific knowledge about environmental issues, or about the environmental consequences of a specific behavior, may function as a barrier to pro-environmental actions: people are in fact frequently unaware of, or uncertain about, the actual state of the environment and the negative consequences of their behaviors on it. For example, a deeper knowledge of environmental issues seems to distinguish committed environmental activists from the general public, although it is difficult to state whether knowledge comes before activism, or vice versa. Both social and personal norms are also related to pro-environmental behaviors. Although some explicit pro-environmental norms are socially shared, people might not always behave according to these social norms, especially because several, sometimes conflicting, norms can be present at the same time in a given situation. In particular, the divergence between prescriptive (what is explicitly prescribed) and descriptive (what is observed in others behaviors) social norms can hamper pro-environmental actions. A series of interesting experiments conduced by R. Cialdini and his colleagues showed that the context in which prescriptive and descriptive norms are framed and made salient can account for a particular environmental behavior such as littering. The role of values and ethical principles in shaping proenvironmental behaviors has been explored as well. A distinction has been proposed between two major value orientations about environmental issues: ecocentrism and anthropocentrism. Ecocentric people value environmental preservation for its own sake; conversely, anthropocentric people value environmental preservation because of the positive consequence that it can have upon human well-being. The former are more likely to behave coherently with their pro-environmental attitudes compared to the latter, even when this implies some personal or economic cost. But what are better methods for the promotion of environmentally responsible behaviors and for the prevention of environmentally adverse behaviors? In his article, Staats outlines various possible strategies that seem to be effective to this end; they can be information-based (e.g., communication campaigns, education, advertising), incentive-based (e.g., monetary rewards/ punishments), prescription-based (e.g., laws, rules, regulations), or community-based (e.g., public involvement and participatory programs). Different kinds of behaviors in different contexts deserve different kinds of strategies. As P. Stern has recently pointed out, there are some basic principles to be followed for enhancing the likelihood of changing environmentally relevant behaviors: the use of mixed intervention strategies, the adoption of an actor s perspective, the constant monitoring of programs, and the promotion of public participation. The models trying to explain the lack of correspondence between pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors that were briefly reviewed above rely on the role of various factors that could interfere with the supposed positive association between attitudes and behaviors. This theoretical position, however, may not adequately account for other social and societal processes involved in people environment relations, in particular, the mutual interdependency of people s actions in the environment. A theoretical approach that delves more directly into this direction is the social dilemma paradigm. Social dilemmas (SDs) are situations in which two or more people are faced with a choice between pursuing individual gains or maximizing collective benefits: if everyone (or too many) chooses the former option, everyone is worse off than they would be if everyone (or sufficiently many) chose the latter. In other words, in a SD, the interest of a single person is in conflict with a more general collective interest, and one is faced with a choice between a defective (or selfish) option and a cooperative (or altruistic) alternative. Such a conflicting situation often exists in the environmental field when individual and collective interests clash over the exploitation of a limited natural resource. These dilemmas are usually referred to as commons dilemmas. As Staats suggest in his article, almost every environmental problem can be framed and approached as a commons dilemma situation. Most of the times the individual-collective conflict in the exploitation of a limited resource has a temporal dimension as well. That is, maximizing individual gains in the short term will result in a collective loss in the long run (the common resource will be extinguished); conversely, limiting the individual gains in the short term will result in a collective benefit in the long run (the common resource will be guaranteed). This process is at the core of the political concept of sustainable development, and has been well illustrated by G. Hardin in his famous 1968 article entitled The Tragedy of the Commons.