What is Environmental Psychology?
First, let’s start with what it’s not.
Environmental psychology isn’t just about studying climate change or pro-environmental behavior. It’s not just our relationship to trees or water or community gardens. It’s not just about how architecture affects our interactions, or how cities affect our happiness, or how lighting affects our productivity. It’s not any one of those things.
Okay, so what is it?
It’s all of these things! Our environment comprises our physical setting, both natural and built. The environment is vast forests and sky scraping buildings. A little backyard and a cozy home office. Celestial bodies and earthly forces.
Environmental psychology is the study of our transactions within these environments. Human-environment relationships occur in all of these places. These environments affect our behavior. Reciprocally, our actions can affect these places.
There are a few things that make environmental psychology unique:
Environmental psychology is interdisciplinary. We overlap with many fields, including architecture, design, urban planning, landscape architecture, information science, and industrial engineering. In some ways, environmental psychology is interchangeable with (or at least includes) architectural psychology, environmental design, person-environment studies, human factors, cognitive ergonomics, and social design.
Environmental psychology aims to improve the human condition and our stewardship of the environment.
Environmental psychology focuses on real-world settings to make a “real-world” impact. We know people don’t just exist in highly-controlled lab settings.
Environmental psychology recognizes personal differences. We know that personal factors shape our interactions. Differences in personality, culture, education, socioeconomic status, privilege, language, gender, and race affect the ways we interact within our environments.
Environmental psychology is pretty new.
Egon Brunswick (1903-1955) was the first to use the term “environmental psychology” in the 1930s. He believed the environment could affect people without them even realizing it. Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) had similar ideas, suggesting performance was a function of a person and their environment. Fast forward a few decades to the 1960s, including a merger with the more-specific architectural psychology, and our field was born.
In comparison to traditional psychology, which dates back hundreds of years, environmental psychology is still developing. We are still exploring new research methods, establishing new principles, and considering new populations and settings.
Which means you’re arriving at the perfect time.
Have you considered how design affects your behavior? How architecture affects your health? How cues from your environment guide your decision-making? How we convince people to act in more sustainable ways? Welcome to environmental psychology!
Future blog posts will discuss how to become an environmental psychologist and what environmental psychologists do.
