Abstract
Recent trends in social psychology point to increased interest in extending current theories by better incorporating the body (e.g., embodied cognition) and the broader interpersonal context (e.g., situations). However, despite being a critical component in early social theorizing, the physical environment remains in large part underdeveloped in most research programs. In this article, I outline an ecological framework for understanding the person–environment relationship. After introducing this perspective, I describe how this approach helps reveal the critical role played by the physical environment in a variety of social processes, including childhood development, interpersonal relationships, and social identity. Finally, I review a topic in environmental psychology that has received little attention among social psychologists: territories. I provide an ecological perspective on how the design, use, and personalization of this type of environment guide and constrain regulatory processes involving social behavior, identity expression, and emotional experience.
In 1976, a special issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin was published dedicated to a discussion of how social psychology and environmental psychology relate to and can learn from one another. At the time, the fortunes of the two disciplines were quite different. Social psychologists were in the midst of a crisis (Nederhof & Zwier, 1983), brought on by internal and external criticisms of their laboratory-based, experimental methodology (Miller, 1972; Rosenthal & Rosnow, 1969) and positivist theoretical framework (Gergen, 1973, 1976; Meehl, 1978). Environmental psychology, on the contrary, was an emerging discipline generating a great deal of excitement, thanks in large part to its focus on very real public concerns regarding pollution, population density, and energy conservation (Borden, 1977) and its potential applications linking researchers to practitioners in design and engineering (Altman, 1976a). Highlighting the contrasting status of the two disciplines, Proshansky (1976), in this same special issue, concluded that he was “pessimistic as to whether social psychology can make any serious contributions to environmental psychology” (p. 359). In truth, very few researchers made any attempt. Despite the inherently social nature of many of the topics broached by these early environmental psychologists (e.g., crowding, privacy, territoriality; Altman, 1976a; Y. M. Epstein, 1976), such environmentally relevant constructs have remained largely on the fringes of social psychology into the present day.
In the 40 years that have followed, social psychology, rather than disappearing (Steiner, 1986), has not only persisted but also grown dramatically as a scientific discipline, boasting hundreds of graduate programs and research labs around the world. Environmental psychology, in contrast, is today a comparably niche area, with only a small handful of graduate departments or concentrations available to potential students. Indeed, by the 1990s, Oishi and Graham (2010) note that the term environmental psychology was mentioned on an average of only 1.58 pages in the typical introductory psychology textbook. What explains this reversal? Critically, the priorities of psychological science shifted in the 1980s. The “cognitive revolution” produced a new, cross-disciplinary focus on studying context-independent internal structures, mechanisms, and processes (Baars, 1986), and social psychologists largely adopted the framework and tools of this new cognitive science (Rozin, 2001). Topics in social psychology like attitudes, prejudice, and biases, for example, came to and continue to be discussed in terms of cognitive schemas, scripts, and representations. Methodologically, social psychologists rely on techniques consistent with the priorities of cognitive psychology, such as self-report scales (to assess explicit representations) and reaction times (to assess implicit representations), largely at the expense of more labor-intensive work observing overt behavior (Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007; Patterson, 2008). Such an emphasis reflects a predominant belief that studying behavior is useful only to the extent a researcher can infer from it the more basic, cognitive process believed to produce that behavior (Macnamara, 1999).
In focusing so exclusively on the development of internal cognitive models and mechanisms (Rozin, 2001), there proved to be little impetus for social psychological researchers to study concepts tied to environmental psychology, which do not lend themselves as naturally to the methodology of cognitive science. Research that requires studying people’s relationship with real, physical environments is inherently context dependent, more difficult to study in a lab, and typically defined in terms of a dynamic system of interrelated factors, rather than cause–effect experimental relationships. 1 Moreover, the underlying belief that internal mental processes are what psychological activity itself is implies that the external world is of minimal importance or only incidentally relevant to the topic of interest. Thus, the role of the physical environment in social processes has remained a largely underexplored topic within the field (Graham, Gosling, & Travis, 2015).
In this article, I seek to renew the dialogue between social and environmental psychology, emphasizing the critical role played by the physical world in guiding and constraining social psychological activity. Critically, a pair of recent trends in social psychology suggests that such a reintegration is timely. First, over the last two decades, a substantial body of research has demonstrated the embodied and situated nature of cognitive processes (Barsalou, 1999, 2008; Marsh, Johnston, Richardson, & Schmidt, 2009; Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2005; Schubert & Semin, 2009; E. R. Smith & Semin, 2004). Perspectives on the specifics of what embodiment entails vary (Alessandroni, 2018; Pouw & Looren de Jong, 2015), but they are consistent in their critiques of the traditional cognitivist framework conceptualizing the mind as an isolated information processor. Instead, one’s physical, bodily state is seen as playing a central role in mental activity, implying that psychological activity must be explained not just in terms of representations and mental models but also in terms of the actions of the entire physical organism.
Second, over the last several years, there has been an increasing amount of work attempting to classify and expand on the concept of situations. Despite the historic refrain in social psychology regarding the “power of the situation,” the lack of work done to actually understand what this concept entails prompted a call for more research by Reis (2008) in his presidential address at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference. Multiple research labs have now used a variety of methodological strategies to develop situation taxonomies (Kelley et al., 2003; Parrigon, Woo, Tay, & Wang, 2017; Rauthmann et al., 2014; Rauthmann, Sherman, & Funder, 2015). Here too, perspectives vary in terms of theoretical assumptions (Rauthmann et al., 2015; Reis, 2018; Yang, Read, & Miller, 2009), but the important role of situations—structured by the social and physical properties of the world—in guiding thoughts, emotions, and behaviors highlights the need for psychologists to move outside the head of the individual to consider the broader context in which psychological activity takes place.
Although these topics have helped to extend psychological theorizing by emphasizing the importance of both the body and the broader interpersonal context, the physical environment still remains in large part underdeveloped within these research programs. A handful of publications have acknowledged the relevance of the physical environment for a variety of social psychological topics (e.g., Cesario, Plaks, Hagiwara, Navarrete, & Higgins, 2010; Gosling, Gaddis, & Vazire, 2008; Graham et al., 2015; Ishii, Miyamoto, Rule, & Toriyama, 2014; Saxbe & Repetti, 2010), but these programs of research have not been rooted in a broader, unifying theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between the person and the immediate physical environment.
In this document, I describe the ecological perspective, a theoretical framework originally developed for the study of perception and action (J. J. Gibson, 1979; Reed, 1996; Turvey & Shaw, 1979; Warren, 2006), but which also has important implications for social and personality psychology (Marsh et al., 2009; Marsh, Richardson, Baron, & Schmidt, 2006; McArthur & Baron, 1983; Meagher & Marsh, 2017). Specifically, I seek to demonstrate how the principles from this perspective provide a means by which researchers can identify how individuals use, adapt to, and are guided by the physical environment in their social thought and behavior. Following an introduction to this approach, I review existing programs of research that demonstrate how the physical world and the social world are intertwined and mutually supporting, starting with the pioneering work of Roger Barker (1968) and continuing into modern-day work in developmental psychology, cross-cultural psychology, and judgment and decision making. Finally, in the last section of the article, I focus on the concept of human territories as a specific illustration of how the ecological perspective can help frame research questions, offer unique predictions, and highlight the fundamental importance of physical settings in a variety of social processes.
Developing an Ecological Framework
The question of how humans and the physical environment relate to one another is a controversial and challenging issue that has hung over psychology since its inception. The distinction between the hard and soft sciences, or the physical and social sciences, in both academia and the broader culture reflects the dichotomy that has been created between the natural world and the world of people. Humans are treated as distinct from animals, interpreting and projecting meaning onto the world, with their physical environments serving as the backdrop for this activity. In conceptualizing humans in this way, the mental (internal) and the physical (external) are largely viewed as distinct systems (Järvilehto, 1998).
However, such a perspective ultimately ignores the ways in which humans and their physical environments form an inseparable pair. From a historical perspective, organisms and environments are the product of a coevolutionary process, in that animals adapt their environment just as they adapt to their environment, and they inherit their environments just as they inherit their genes (Lewontin, 1978, 2002; Swenson & Turvey, 1991; Withagen & van Wermeskerken, 2010). Thus, to speak of the activity of an organism is to imply and necessitate a physical ecology that is capable of supporting that activity. Recognizing how human activity is contingent upon complementary environmental properties can help reveal the broader constellation of factors on which human behavior is dependent.
It was this acknowledgment of the necessary mutuality between the environment and the animal that led to the development of J. J. Gibson’s (1966) ecological approach to perception. This point is captured in the opening chapters of his most well-known works: The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (J. J. Gibson, 1979). He begins both books not by discussing the anatomy of sensory organs (as would be more typical for treatises on perception), but instead by providing a detailed description of the ecological context for perception. That is, what does the world consist of in which perception is possible? This simple insight—that you cannot discuss perception without understanding the mediums through which light, chemicals, and vibrations move and the surfaces that reflect these forms of energy—represented a critical shift toward recognizing the fundamental role of the physical environment in guiding and constraining psychological activity.
Of particular note, J. J. Gibson (1979) coined the term affordances to describe “what [the environment] offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (p. 127). These functional properties of the environment are not subjective projections from the perceiver onto the world, nor are they inherent, objective properties of the environment. Rather, they exist as a result of how the perceiver and environment relate to one another. Environments offer possibilities for action in relation to the behavioral potentials of the organism, known as the organism’s effectivities (Shaw, Turvey, & Mace, 1982). Steps are climbable (Warren, 1984), seats usable (Mark, 1987), and apertures passable (Warren & Whang, 1987) only when both the properties of the perceiver and the physical characteristics of the object or setting allow for such an action. Thus, for the ecological perspective, meaning about the world exists to be discovered perceptually and realized behaviorally.
In addition, in the process of regulating to the environment, organisms can also bring about changes in the affordances of that space. In fact, this process is widely regarded among biologists as a critical component of evolutionary history (Lewontin, 1978, 2002; Odling-Smee, Laland, & Feldman, 2003): Organisms adapt their environments just as they adapt to their environments. Through this activity of niche construction (Costall, 1995; Heft, 2007; Withagen & van Wermeskerken, 2010), behavioral opportunities previously unavailable to the organism can be created. Although a ubiquitous phenomenon across essentially all species, this process of niche construction reaches its apex among humans, who have dramatically altered the physical world to facilitate new behavioral opportunities. By mastering the use of fire and harnessing wood and stone to build and create simple tools, humans were able to not only develop the means by which to accomplish existing behaviors more effectively (e.g., breaking the shell of a nut) but also create entirely new behavioral opportunities (e.g., cooking, bicycling). Moreover, as we will see, the fundamental sociality of humans necessitates the creation of niches and affordances relative to the behavioral abilities of larger groups.
Ecological Theory in Early Social Psychology: Behavior Settings
The discussion of ecological theory so far in this article has focused on the relationship between a single person and the physical environment. However, the concept of ecological theorizing is not alien to social psychology. Roger Barker and Herbert Wright, both of whom studied with Kurt Lewin, developed their own form of ecological psychology in the middle of the last century (Barker, 1968; Barker & Wright, 1949, 1951, 1955) Together they established a field research station in a small Midwestern town where they sought to observe and record the daily activity of the children living there.
Barker and his colleagues found that there was a great deal of order, consistency, and predictability in the children’s behavior. Although their initial expectation was that the activity of a child would be predicted by proximal, antecedent events, such as directives from parents and teachers or from interactions with peers, they instead found that such relationships were quite weak. Instead, the much stronger observable pattern was that the children’s actions tended to be congruent with where the child was being observed (Heft, 2001, 2018). In fact, the actions of an individual child were found to have greater variability across different locations than did the actions of different children in the same location.
To explain these results, Barker adopted a more molar level of analysis, focusing neither on proximal social inputs nor on dispositional traits. Instead, Barker developed the concept of behavior settings to account for the higher order dynamical structure accounting for the “standing patterns of behavior” (Barker, 1968, p. 18) that exist in a particular location at a particular time. That is, he conceptualized behavior settings as discrete, self-regulating behavioral events, sustained by the collective behavior of the social system’s members. They are a higher order concept in that they are defined by the joint actions of participating individuals who maintain these standing patterns of behavior. For example, the social activity characteristic of the worship service of a church—patterns of kneeling, sitting, listening, and singing—are not dependent on any single congregant being present or absent, but are nevertheless sustained by the group en masse. In this way, the activity is socially distributed across the members of the congregation (Hutchins, 1995; E. R. Smith & Semin, 2004) and ultimately self-sustaining. An individual is socially guided and constrained by the activity of the setting, but he or she also contributes to and helps maintain the ongoing pattern of behavior by participating in it.
Fuller reviews of Barker’s work have been written elsewhere (e.g., Heft, 2001, 2007, 2018; Wicker, 1979, 2002, 2012), but for the purposes of the present document what is notable about this theory is its integration of the physical environment with these higher order patterns of social behavior. Barker recognized that behavior settings are bounded by real geographic locations and supported by physical objects, what he called the milieu. Critically, he described these physical structures as synomorphic to behavior, that is, they are congruent in terms of their structure (Barker, 1968). For example, a game of baseball, as a behavior setting, is defined by the distributed standing patterns of behavior of those taking part. However, that standing pattern of behavior consists of actions that necessitate certain physical structures: swinging (a bat), hitting (a ball), and rounding (the bases). Without these physical objects, the social activity under discussion ceases to actually be a game of baseball. This point highlights the idea of organism–environment mutuality central to ecological theorizing. The milieu was designed, arranged, or purchased to match the patterns of behavior engaged in it, but the milieu itself further maintains and facilitates that pattern of social activity through its continued use.
As a higher order entity, behavior settings consist of multiply nested, yet interdependent sets of affordances (Heft, 2001). For example, a classroom consists of chairs that afford sitting, desks that afford note-taking, and so on, relative to the physical attributes of the students. Collectively, these affordances provide the synomorphic milieu that allows for the higher order joint activity of classroom learning. The success of this space as a classroom is therefore tied to how well it maintains the patterns of social behavior that characterize collective learning, which itself is determined by whether there are adequate and salient affordances for the individual participants in this setting. Thus, the physical environment is designed to facilitate both the behavioral self-regulation of individuals and the regulation of the collective social patterns of behavior that constitute the behavior setting.
Further Ecologizing Social Psychology: Current and Future Directions
To summarize, the ecological approach emphasizes the mutuality between person and environment, recognizing that behavior is ultimately constrained and guided by the affordances of the ecology. Individuals engage in exploratory perceptual activity to pick up information about the world that allows for the regulation of behavior with respect to the environment. As cultural animals, however, the affordances that humans regulate themselves to are overwhelmingly influenced by their sociocultural context. Moving beyond Barker’s (1968) early contributions, a number of further issues emerge when considering the ways in which the social and physical worlds jointly structure human activity.
The Social Learning of Affordances
One unique aspect of human life is that learning frequently comes about through social interaction. That is, people discover what they can do and the variety of uses for objects and places by being introduced to them by other people (Costall, 1995). Heft (2007) referred to this process as socially mediated attunement, in which individuals are taught by others (actively and passively) about what behavioral opportunities in the environment are available to them. For example, Withagen and Caljouw (2017) describe how children learn about the affordances of a playground: by perceiving other children playing and/or by being guided by their parents. Just as information about the possibilities for a physical object can be learned through active looking and touching, so too can information about the world be learned through conversation and instruction (Hodges, 2009).
In addition to learning about new behavioral opportunities from others, social forces also provide instruction for the appropriate uses of physical objects. Cutting (1982) noted that any single object offers an individual a near-limitless array of affordances. A single piece of paper, for example, can be used to make a map, to clean one’s teeth, to make paper dolls, to crumple into a ball, and so on. Nevertheless, normative uses, or what Costall (2012) called canonical affordances, exist for objects within a particular sociocultural context. Although a pencil can be used to stir cream into coffee or to scratch one’s back or to save one’s place in a book, it is nevertheless for writing, a behavior that is socially taught.
In addition to learning what an object can be used for, humans must also learn who is allowed to realize the affordances of different objects and places. In fact, ownership is among the most salient and important concepts to young children. Issues related to the possession of objects account for anywhere between half to three quarters of all quarrels observed between children aged 2 to 5 (Bronson, 1975; P. K. Smith & Green, 1975). More than simply being motivated to have access to the most desirable objects, children fight over possessions even when duplicate objects are available (Hay & Ross, 1982) and stand up for the property rights of other people (Kanngiesser, Gjersoe, & Hood, 2010; Nancekivell & Friedman, 2017; Rossano, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2011). Critically, the process of learning what affordances are socially prohibited (i.e., only allowable for the owner) is a gradual one, as children’s conceptions of ownership become increasingly complex during development (Friedman, 2008, 2010; Friedman & Neary, 2008; Nancekivell & Friedman, 2014; Neary & Friedman, 2014).
Social psychological processes are therefore closely involved in learning what affordances are both possible and permissible for an individual to realize. Beyond individual possessions, many physical locations in the world are strongly associated with particular individuals or groups (Ledgerwood & Liviatan, 2010; Ledgerwood, Liviatan, & Carnevale, 2007), such as racialized urban environments (Bonam, Bergsieker, & Eberhardt, 2016; Verkuyten & Martinovic, 2017) and gendered professional and academic environments (Cheryan, Meltzoff, & Kim, 2011; Cheryan, Plaut, Davies, & Steele, 2009; Emerson & Murphy, 2014; Murphy, Kroeper, & Ozier, 2018). Moreover, certain ideologies, such as ambivalent sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996, 2012), explicitly advocate for distinct, gendered behavioral domains. The behavioral consequences of being embedded in such spaces (either as an in-group or out-group member) have only been minimally investigated (e.g., Cheryan et al., 2009). One possibility is that, just as social learning can guide humans to be better attuned to socially appropriate affordances, social influence may also be able to inhibit attunement to alternative behavioral opportunities. Beliefs such as ambivalent sexism, when reified culturally, may attune (or inhibit) men and women to quite distinct behavioral opportunities within their environments, thereby attenuating adaptive behavior (Marsh & Meagher, 2016; Meagher, 2017; Meagher & Kang, 2013).
Designing Social Space
Another way in which sociocultural factors guide behavioral attunement is in the actual design of the physical world. Unlike objects in the natural world, cultural artifacts and built environments are generally created for very specific functions, thereby inviting particular types of behavior (Withagen, de Poel, Araújo, & Pepping, 2012). A drinking glass, for example, can be used for a variety of functions: as a paperweight, to trace a circle, or to catch a bug, among other possibilities. Nevertheless, its physical properties, with respect to an adult human, are designed specifically to make the affordance of “drinking” easily detectable: Its opening at the top is proportionate to a human mouth, its size is such that it easily allows for grasping and lifting by an adult hand, it may be transparent to provide easy visibility for the amount of liquid inside, and so on. In the same way, although the length of a human’s legs allows for a range of heights at which an action like climbing, sitting, and jumping up is possible, there are optimal “best-fit affordances” (Warren, 1984, p. 686), based on factors such as minimal energy expenditure. Thus, from the perspective of architectural design and ergonomics (Withagen et al., 2012), the physical, built environment can be designed in ways that facilitate more effective, functional regulation by increasing the ease with which individuals become attuned to possible affordances.
Physical environments will therefore also differ in the extent that they provide an effective milieu for different types of social behaviors. For example, research on college dormitories, hospitals, and nursing homes has demonstrated that certain designs (e.g., suite vs. apartment layouts) influence the frequency of social interactions and subsequent feelings of belonging (Bronkema & Bowman, 2017; Devlin, Donovan, Nicolov, Nold, & Zandan, 2008; Dijkstra, Pieterse, & Pruyn, 2006; Ullán et al., 2012). Complexes that are designed to increase the frequency of chance encounters appear to enhance the social lives of occupants (Easterbrook & Vignoles, 2015). Alternatively, certain physical environments may be synomorphic with (i.e., designed to match or support) maladaptive patterns of social behavior, at the level of both individuals (e.g., dysfunctional roommates unsuccessfully sharing a space) and groups (e.g., gang members at the border of their territories). For example, the concept of crowding, a topic of interest for many early environmental psychologists (Proshansky, Ittelson, & Rivlin, 1972; Stokols, 1972, 1976), represents the stress associated with having insufficient social space to effectively self-regulate, leading to frustration, aggression, and performance reduction (Heller, Groff, & Solomon, 1977; Paulus, Annis, Seta, Schkade, & Matthews, 1976; Sundstrom, 1975). Cesario et al. (2010) offer another example of how maladaptive psychological processes are dependent on the larger organism–environment system. These researchers primed participants with images of Black men (a threatening out-group), but manipulated the size of the space their participants were in when observing these images. They found that individuals showed a behavioral and cognitive flight response when placed in an open field that facilitated running, but they showed an aggressive, fight response when seated in an enclosed space where flight was impossible. Thus, the same images produced quite different prejudicial behavioral tendencies, depending on the physical constraints of the broader environment.
There are many types of interpersonal interactions, and more research is needed to understand how environmental design might facilitate or inhibit these different types. Of particular value is the question of how different physical spaces may aid in the satisfaction of fundamental psychological needs, such as affiliation, competence, and autonomy (Deci & Ryan, 2000). For example, recent research in social rejection has found that individuals respond to negative experience in a variety of ways, ranging from affiliative motives to antisocial behavior (Maner, DeWall, Baumeister, & Schaller, 2007; Williams, 2007). However, Meagher and Marsh (2017) proposed that the available affordances in the environment will in part guide such responses. They found a general preference for nonsocial space following rejection, suggesting that, when the affordances are available, people may seek out spaces that provide solitude to protect themselves from further social pain (Nguyen, Ryan, & Deci, 2017; Ren, Wesselmann, & Williams, 2016). Moreover, in addition to seeking out new settings to satisfy social needs, humans also construct their own environments in ways that reflect their motives (Gosling, Ko, Mannarelli, & Morris, 2002; Heft, 2007; Withagen & van Wermeskerken, 2010). Ultimately, different environments and designs may be more effective in helping individuals recover from these negative social experiences, but identifying the key characteristics of such places, relative to the individuals seeking them, will require further investigation.
The Ecology of Culture
Beyond the simple person–environment relationship, macro-level cultural processes are also closely coupled with the physical world. For example, certain affordances exist only within the context of a particular sociocultural community that collectively creates and maintains that behavioral opportunity (Costall, 1995; Heft, 1989, 2007, 2017). J. J. Gibson (1979), for example, suggested that a mailbox affords mailing a letter. However, this is true only for “a letter-writing human in a community with a postal system” (p. 139). In other words, this affordance is situated within a broader social system. Unlike the simple body-scaling relationship of leg-length to step-height when determining the opportunity for climbing, this relationship is tripartite: dependent on the physical structure of the box to store the letter, the effectivities of the individual as a person capable of writing a letter, and the larger system of social practices involving sorting and transportation. As Heft (2017) notes, the individual does not need to know how their letter gets from the mailbox to the recipient to be aware of the affordance. Rather, she only needs to know what proximal behaviors are necessary to produce that desired outcome (e.g., purchasing stamps, addressing the envelope, depositing it in the mailbox).
Because certain affordances are brought into existence through the activity of the society at large, the many unique social values and priorities of different cultures come to be reflected in the products, artifacts, and built environments they produce (Boiger, De Deyne, & Mesquita, 2013; Ishii et al., 2014; Kim & Markus, 1999; Lamoreaux & Morling, 2012; Morling & Lamoreaux, 2008; Wang, Masuda, Ito, & Rashid, 2012). In fact, a meta-analysis by Morling and Lamoreaux (2008) found that cultural products, such as physical advertisements, reveal differences in individualism and collectivism between Western (e.g., the United States) and Eastern (e.g., Korea, Japan, China) societies to a greater extent than do self-reported measures from actual individuals within those societies. Moreover, beyond simply reflecting personal or societal preferences, interacting with these structural differences in the physical world actually leads to notable differences in subsequent cognitive activity. Differences in cognitive styles, such as analytic versus holistic attention, have been found to be reflected in patterns of art and architecture designed across different cultures (Masuda, Gonzalez, Kwan, & Nisbett, 2008; Miyamoto, Nisbett, & Masuda, 2006). For example, physical environments in cities from Japan tend to be structurally more ambiguous and more complex than equivalent environments in the United States, and exposure to images of these scenes actually leads to subsequent changes in a perceiver’s attentional focus (Miyamoto et al., 2006). Thus, this relationship between humans and their physical environments continues to be coadaptive—just as humans design the spaces they occupy, these spaces in turn exert an influence on psychological functioning.
Similarly, recent work on human decision making has revealed ways in which so-called cognitive biases are actually adaptive heuristics with respect to the individual’s particular environment. This work on “ecological rationality” (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002; Marewski & Schooler, 2011; Pleskac & Hertwig, 2014) and “social sampling” (Galesic, Olsson, & Rieskamp, 2012, 2018) argues that the heuristics humans use are based on the structure of information in the environment and rooted in basic perceptual processes. For example, Goldstein and Gigerenzer (2002) demonstrate how the recognition heuristic—the tendency to assume that a recognized object will have a higher value than an unrecognized object with respect to a criterion—is in fact quite adaptive in an environment where exposure frequency and criterion quantity are in fact positively correlated. Thus, the structure of the environmental information (e.g., the frequency of a city being mentioned in major newspapers) mediates both the use and effectiveness of such a heuristic. Theories of decision making therefore require modeling “not only the decision process but also the environment to which the process is adapted” (Pleskac & Hertwig, 2014, p. 2000).
At the same time, qualities that characterize and differentiate cultures have also been linked to a variety of ecological factors (Oishi & Graham, 2010; Sng, Neuberg, Varnum, & Kenrick, 2018). Physical variables such as climate (Anderson, Anderson, Dorr, DeNeve, & Flanagan, 2000), density (Sng, Neuberg, Varnum, & Kenrick, 2017), and elevation (Oishi, Talhelm, & Lee, 2015) have all been shown to be associated with the behavioral tendencies of the population living in such environments (e.g., aggression, mating strategies, and extraversion, respectively). The intergroup conflict that exists within cultures is also rooted in ecology. Certainly, access to physical resources, such as land and territory, has long been recognized as a driver of negative out-group attitudes (Jackson, 1993). More recently, Bou Zeineddine and Pratto (2017) have argued for broader recognition of the ecology of political power, noting that empowerment is not a property of individuals or groups, but it is instead a function of a community or party’s access to environmental structures that afford security, community, health care, and education. Thus, understanding aggression, prejudice, or bias requires recognizing how the affordances of the environment may differ among individuals of different social groups.
A Summary of Future Research and Applications
The research described above highlights the many ways in which the social world and the physical world are closely intertwined. Building on this work requires recognizing that the physical structure of the world is not merely incidental to social psychological processes, but rather critical for supporting existing patterns of cultural expression (Masuda et al., 2008; Miyamoto et al., 2006), social and relationship dynamics (Arriaga, Goodfriend, & Lohmann, 2004; Lohmann, Arriaga, & Goodfriend, 2003), and potential conflict (Bou Zeineddine & Pratto, 2017; G. Brown, 2009). The ecological paradigm asks researchers to consider what patterns of social activity a particular physical environment is synomorphic with and how individuals occupying that space will regulate their behavior with respect to its structure and form. Although a number of potential avenues for investigation emerge from adopting this perspective, three particular issues are worth highlighting from the research described above:
Individual differences in behavior: How do individuals differ in their ability to effectively regulate with respect to particular types of physical environments? For example, to what extent do social psychological constructs, such as one’s social identity, lead to distinct cycles of perceptual activity within environments that have clear in-group/out-group associations? To what extent are spaces designed in ways that inhibit particular types of individuals?
The use of environments to satisfy psychological needs: In what ways do people construct or seek out certain physical environments that promote their own psychological motives and desires? For example, what psychological needs are reflected in how a person designs a space or by the types of settings he or she enters following certain social experiences? To what extent are these needs actually satisfied by distinct forms of design and arrangement? How are individual (and cultural) differences expressed in the way people use different types of physical environments?
The design of space to facilitate certain psychological processes: To what extent can a physical environment be designed to either facilitate or inhibit particular patterns of social thought and behavior? For example, what types of places can facilitate prosocial as opposed to antisocial interactions? How are apartments, streets, or neighborhoods structured in ways that promote either egalitarian or prejudicial group or dyadic functioning?
Questions such as these involve dramatically situating social psychological processes by nesting them within the physical environments that humans share with other people. As Barker (1968) found, behavior is best predicted by place, which is structured by ongoing, collective social activity and the physical milieu that supports it. Teaching is done in a classroom. Food is purchased and consumed at a restaurant. Sports are played at the park. The locations of these activities are not arbitrary—the physical milieu is designed and arranged in such a way as to facilitate the collective social activity situated there. Thus, causality, from this perspective, is found in the dynamics and relationship between people, their physical world, and their social world (Marsh et al., 2009).
An Illustration: An Ecological Account of Territories
Although all psychological activity is embedded in physical environments, certain types of settings are going to have more prominent roles in the functioning of a particular person than will others. In this final portion of the article, I will review research on human territories (e.g., home environments; Graham et al., 2015) through the lens of the ecological perspective articulated above, demonstrating how this approach can help researchers address the three directions for future research articulated in the previous section.
Territories are perhaps the most ubiquitous type of physical environments occupied by humans (Edney, 1976), and they are inherently social, as possessing a territory involves the use of a space with respect to others. Moreover, they provide a particularly clear example of how a physical setting can be integral in guiding behavioral, cognitive, and emotional processes. From an ecological perspective, the question to explore is the following: What patterns of activity is a territory synomorphic with? In other words, how does the structure, design, and components of a territory guide the activity of the individual who occupies that space?
Individual Differences in Behavior Within Territories
According to Altman (1975), one of the main factors predicting whether a particular setting will become a territory is the amount of time spent occupying the space. The longer the amount of time spent in a particular environment, the more one comes to feel that it is theirs. As a consequence, residents have a history of perceptual exploration and behavioral activity within their territories, which allows for greater attunement to the higher order invariants in that environment. Ultimately, the current activity of a resident in his or her territory is not an isolated, independent event. Rather, it is behavior nested within a history of temporally extending, continuing events, which includes prior activity exploring, designing, and inhabiting the setting. This past activity will provide a resident with greater sensitivity to the ecological information specifying the structure and features of the environment (E. Gibson & Rader, 1979; Reed, 1996).
Ethologists have long acknowledged the benefits of site familiarity among a wide variety of species (Piper, 2011). Previous occupancy provides residents with opportunities to learn various forms of functional information that will facilitate more successful activity. For example, familiarity provides enhanced knowledge of food locations (Bradshaw, Hindell, Sumner, & Michael, 2004; González-Gómez & Vásquez, 2006), more efficient movement and navigation (Cain, Gerin, & Moller, 1994), and more effective escape strategies when fleeing from predators (C. Brown, 2001). For humans, territories are generally structured in ways that will help a resident scaffold the particular types of behavior they are most likely to engage in at that particular location (Fujita, 2011). For example, Graham et al. (2015) report the differences in people’s desired “ambiances” for different types of rooms in their home: Dining rooms are for family interaction, studies are for productivity and quietness, and bedrooms are for romance and comfort.Having this type of control over the environment is related to many positive outcomes, particularly in organizational contexts, where personalization of one’s desk and office is associated with job satisfaction (Lee & Brand, 2005), well-being (Wells, 2000), and work performance (O’Neill, 1994; Robertson & Huang, 2006). Conversely, residents are also able to design their territories in ways that can inhibit maladaptive forms of behavior. By engaging in what is called prospective self-control (Fujita, 2011; Trope & Fishbach, 2005), occupants can remove temptations and prevent their home from affording the undesirable behavior they wish to avoid. Again, beyond just being a positive emotional or psychological boost, the space over time literally changes to reflect the patterns of behavior engaged in by the occupant, ultimately coming to better support preferred activities.
Moreover, through extended occupancy, design, and personalization, a resident is able to rely on certain consistencies within the environment. In other words, territories provide the environmental milieu necessary for a variety of habitual behaviors (Edney, 1976; Wood, 2017). Always hanging one’s towel up in the same physical location, for example, means limited effort is required to uncover its location each day. Thus, a highly familiar territory allows behavioral control to be distributed across the entire setting, thereby requiring less effort on the part of the resident to discover how to effectively navigate.
Although the automaticity of behavior that results from these consistencies is often conceptualized as running mechanically off of some type of fixed mental program, the ecological perspective would hypothesize that experience in a setting will actually provide an individual with greater behavioral flexibility. As E. Gibson and Rader (1979) argue, experience involves perceptual learning, becoming more efficient at detecting high-quality information about the world. For example, expertise at a particular skill—for example, mountain climbing—involves being able to quickly and accurately detect information, such as whether a rock indentation would support one’s weight, signs of loose gravel, and the tautness of one’s rope. In the same way, a resident should be able to quickly and easily navigate and function within his or her own familiar space.
In fact, a resident not only has a long history of previous activity in his or her home territory, but this history of behavior is itself highly varied. Individuals perform a wide variety of activities in their homes, including working, relaxing, preparing food, entertaining guests, watching children, and many more. Critically, it is this variability of behavior that helps one come to better and more deeply understand how to function within the environment. Differential learning theory (Frank, Michelbrink, Beckmann, & Schöllhorn, 2008; Schöllhorn, Hegen, & Davids, 2012) has highlighted the fact that behavioral performance is most enhanced when skills are learned in highly diverse, complex, and nonrepetitive ways. In this way, “noisy” training allows individuals to discover optimal performance patterns.
Consistent with this account, there is in fact evidence that human residents are able to engage more efficiently in a variety of behaviors because of their greater awareness of the environmental invariants specific to the setting. For example, assessments of elderly and disabled adults’ motor skills (i.e., ability to interact with and move around the environment) and process skills (i.e., ability to carry out actions/steps and modify performance) have been found to be greater when measured in their home, relative to clinical settings (Hoppes, Davis, & Thompson, 2003; Provencher, Demers, Gagnon, & Gélinas, 2012; Provencher, Demers, & Gélinas, 2009; Raina, Rogers, & Holm, 2007). Tellingly, these improvements appear to be particularly substantial for those with impaired executive functioning (Provencher et al., 2012), who most benefit from having this existing history of behavior within the environment.
In a very different domain of study, sports scientists have produced the largest body of empirical work assessing performance in terms of one’s relationship to the physical environment. This work has revealed an effect known as the home-field advantage, “a consistent finding that home teams in sport competitions win over 50% of games played under a balanced home and away schedule” (Courneya & Carron, 1991, p. 13). In fact, a meta-analysis of 87 studies covering 10 different sports found that home teams win approximately 60% of all matches (Jamieson, 2010). Initial explanations for this advantage pointed to the social support provided by spectators (Schwartz & Barsky, 1977), but subsequent research has found that neither the number of spectators nor crowd density appears to be positively related to the size of the effect (Clarke & Norman, 1995; Gómez, Pollard, & Luis-Pascual, 2011; Pollard, 1986), and home teams tend to win more often even when the audience are absent (van de ven, 2011) or hostile (Salminen, 1993). More recently, a defense account has been proposed to explain home advantage as a protective response to symbolic invasions of one’s turf, leading to an increase in competitiveness and dominance (Allen & Jones, 2014; Gómez et al., 2011; Pollard, 2006; Pollard & Gómez, 2009). Although there is tentative evidence for higher testosterone levels among home teams compared with visiting teams (Carré, Muir, Belanger, & Putnam, 2006; Neave & Wolfson, 2003), there is little evidence that home teams actually act more aggressively than visitors (Jones, Bray, & Olivier, 2005; Thomas, Reeves, & Smith, 2006), and several studies have found no difference in terms of mood or anxiety between home teams and visitors (Bray & Martin, 2003; Polman, Nicholls, Cohen, & Borkoles, 2007).
The alternative, ecological account of this phenomenon would instead attribute performance differences to the efficiency with which individuals are able to detect information specifying the affordances in the environment. In fact, a wealth of empirical work has demonstrated that visuospatial awareness and activity differ for familiar locations, relative to unknown settings (R. A. Epstein, Higgins, Jablonski, & Feiler, 2007; Müller, Strumpf, Scholz, Baier, & Melloni, 2013; Sugiura, Shah, Zilles, & Fink, 2005), and experimentally manipulated familiarity can lead to increased viewpoint invariance, potentially reflecting greater understanding of how different perspectives relate to the layout a single environmental (R. A. Epstein, Higgins, & Thompson-Schill, 2005). Moreover, previous exposure to an environment has also been found to facilitate visual search patterns, even without the perceivers’ explicit awareness (Chun & Jiang, 1998; Henderson, 2003; Hoffmann & Sebald, 2005). Correlational evidence supports the behavioral value of a resident’s history with the setting in a number of sporting contexts. For example, relocated teams show a temporarily reduced advantage after moving to a new stadium (Pollard, 2002; Wilkinson & Pollard, 2006), and home advantage tends to increase with the number of consecutive games played at home (Courneya & Carron, 1991). Atypical environmental features also seem to enhance the effect, with teams showing stronger home advantage when their field (e.g., artificial turf; Barnett & Hilditch, 1993; Clarke & Norman, 1995) or stadium (e.g., domed roof; Romanowich, 2012) is distinctive.
To summarize, the resident–territory relationship is unique in part because of the long history of activity that has taken place within it. Individuals alter these spaces in ways that facilitate particular long-running patterns of behavior, thereby facilitating habits. However, rather than simply functioning in a more mechanical way, there is evidence that residents regulate their behavior in more flexible and efficient ways, as demonstrated in a vast research literature on performance enhancement in home environments. Thus, being embedded in this particular physical location leads to clear differences in the behavior of residents, relative to visitors.
The Use of Territories to Satisfy Psychological Needs
Although spending more time in a setting increases the likelihood of it being a territory, familiarity alone does not explain this relationship. After all, a delinquent child may be quite familiar with the principal’s office, but it is certainly not his territory. Altman (1975) therefore argued that a setting must also be central to one’s sense of self for the space to become a primary territory. That a particular place could be so central to an individual’s self-concept suggests that territories may serve an important function in satisfying a number of basic psychological needs.
For example, a motive for a coherent self-identity can be reflected in how residents physically alter a setting in ways that communicate their ties to a space. Behavior of this sort is known as marking. Numerous animal species deposit their scent or strip the bark off of trees to communicate boundaries and ownership to others (du P Bothma & Coertze, 2004; Marchinton & Kile, 1977). In a similar way, humans also engage in marking behavior, though typically with the use of symbols and artifacts—such as photographs of family and friends, artwork and decorations, or objects representing a favorite hobby—rather than direct body-related by-products.
Unlike other animals, however, the setting can itself be arranged in such a way as to communicate aspects of the resident’s taste, style, and preferences. Gosling and his colleagues (Gosling et al., 2008; Gosling et al., 2002) have described many of these environmental alterations as self-directed identity claims, markings made for the individual’s own benefit that reinforce his or her self-concept. For example, prominently displaying an object with sentimental meaning (e.g., a rock from one’s childhood yard) will communicate little to outsiders, but would strongly reinforce to the owner his or her personal narrative. Moreover, individuals may mark their space in ways to express an idealized self-concept. Gosling et al. (2002) pointed out the possibility of other-directed identity claims, symbolic markings that seek to make statements to others about how the resident would like to be regarded. Objects like bumper stickers (Szlemko, Benfield, Bell, Deffenbacher, & Troup, 2008) and office door decorations (Sandilands & McMullin, 1980) are particularly likely to be other-directed, in light of the fact that the objects are rarely within the perceptual field of the resident. In so doing, occupants are able to communicate socially to others via the environment, thereby facilitating subsequent interaction by making their interests and behavioral tendencies known. In fact, a substantial body of supporting evidence now exists to suggest that homes and offices reflect surprisingly accurate information about the personalities and characteristics of inhabitants (Gosling et al., 2002; McElroy, Morrow, & Ackerman, 1983; Sadalla, Vershure, & Burroughs, 1987; Wells & Thelen, 2002).
In addition to this conscious marking behavior, Gosling et al. (2008) also note the existence of what they call behavioral residue, the physical traces left in the environment following the resident’s previous activity. An artist will likely have sketches or paint lying about, a musician may have instruments readily accessible, and an athlete will probably have running shoes near the door. Though less direct, this residue generally reflects repeated behaviors and therefore also communicates information about the attributes and identity of a resident. Although conceptually distinct, these various forms of environmental markings are not mutually exclusive. For example, what was originally simply behavioral residue may become a more overt and conscious identity display over time. Skis near the door may originally be simply the physical traces of a recent mountain vacation, but by leaving these skis out the resident may ultimately continue to reinforce a particular athletic persona for himself or herself.
It is important to recognize the bidirectionality of this process. Even as the setting comes to reflect the inhabitant through continued marking behavior, the environment itself will help to shape and redefine the resident’s identity over time. For example, an individual who sees himself as a movie buff will likely create a space that facilitates that particular behavior (e.g., having a large screen television, a comfortable chair, and adjacent mini-fridge). But as a consequence of this arrangement, the environment is going to invite the occupant to actualize those affordances (Withagen et al., 2012). Repeatedly engaging in those behaviors thereby establishes habits, which in turn will guide the development of the individual’s self-concept and personality through self-perceptual processes (Wood, 2017).
Of course, many human territories are shared with others, such as officemates, roommates, or partners/spouses. One of the challenges involved in sharing these environments is balancing the need for individual space and expression while also allowing the environment to gradually reflect not only the individuals but also the social unit. Having smaller territories within the larger, shared environment may serve an important role in reducing the stress of everyday social interactions (Costa, 2012). For example, within a home environment, having established seats at the dining room table, personalized rooms, and clear sides of the bed to sleep on vastly reduces the stress and conflict arising from sharing a single location with several other people by providing clear expectations for communal conduct. Consistent with this idea, Altman, Taylor, and Wheeler (1971), in a study of Naval recruits living in pairs in prolonged isolation, observed that greater territoriality early in the study predicted smoother social functioning between the pair and a reduced likelihood of aborting the experiment. Thus, certain patterns of space usage may be reflective of more or less functional social arrangements.
Nevertheless, successful cohabitating partners may also need to create settings that are couple-referential, reinforcing their status as a joint unit (Arriaga et al., 2004; Lohmann et al., 2003; Werner, 1987; Werner, Brown, Altman, & Staples, 1992). Thus, a territory may also play an important role in effectively (or ineffectively) satisfying one’s needs for belonging and intimacy. For example, Lohmann et al. (2003) found that relationship closeness and commitment in cohabitating couples was associated with having favorite possessions in the home that were acquired jointly. Just as displays of art, books, and music may reinforce an individual’s identity as an open person, one can be embedded in an environment with objects that reinforce feelings of interpersonal connection with the other person. By providing common ground and the referents for conversation (Clark, 1996), the milieu of a space may serve an important function in guiding positive (or negative) interactions between partners. In fact, the ways in which couples share space, and then interact within that space, have encouraged theorizing in clinical work, using territorial functioning as a way to frame marital therapy (Orathinkal & Vansteenwegen, 2006).
Even beyond close relationships, there is also evidence that physical spaces can reinforce one’s broader social identity. Ledgerwood and colleagues (Ledgerwood & Liviatan, 2010; Ledgerwood et al., 2007) have conducted a number of studies demonstrating how the evaluation of group-relevant buildings (e.g., property associated with the history of one’s ethnic group) is motivated by a desire for group-based affirmation. That is, commitment to one’s group identity predicted a more positive evaluation of group-associated property, as well as a desire for the value of that property to receive social recognition. Being able to enter settings such as these can help reinforce this identity (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 1983) and enhance feelings of self-worth (Korpela, 1989; Korpela, Hartig, Kaiser, & Fuhrer, 2001)
In addition to sharing a territory with other people, the other type of social interaction common for residents is the process of engaging with visitors. Despite the emphasis placed on antagonistic and competitive activity when discussing territoriality, the majority of social interactions within territories by humans are not hostile. Rather, residents spend most of their time with people whom they have invited into the space. Nevertheless, the social psychological literature on hosting remains nearly nonexistent (for an exception, see Sebba & Churchman, 1983). One potentially relevant process in designing a territory is control-oriented markings, which communicate the ownership and boundary of a space (Altman, 1975; G. Brown, 2009; G. Brown, Lawrence, & Robinson, 2005). A name placard on the door to an office, for example, clearly indicates who controls and has unrestricted access to that environment. Thus, beyond reinforcing a specific identity, marking can also reinforce a particular role—that of owner and host—that can help satisfy needs for autonomy while in that particular place. One of the key forces guiding the patterns of action in a behavior setting, according to Barker (1968), is the respective roles of the individuals within it. What is notable is that an individual’s role is defined in terms of how he or she functions within the behavior–milieu synomorphy. An elementary school teacher has unique access to certain features of the classroom (e.g., the chalkboard, the windows) that her students do not without her permission, which partially defines her unique status and role. In the same way, the interaction between a resident and a visitor is going to be guided in part by the difference in how they regulate with respect to the space: the host in a largely unrestricted way, the visitor in a more dependent way.
This power discrepancy has the potential to manifest itself in a variety of ways. People in their territories appear to be more resistant to social pressure (Han, Li, & Shi, 2009; Harris & McAndrew, 1986) and more likely to successfully influence others (G. Brown & Baer, 2011; Conroy & Sundstrom, 1977; Martindale, 1971; Taylor & Lanni, 1981). G. Brown and Baer (2011) found that confidence partially mediated the observed outcome discrepancy between those negotiating in their own office and those in someone else’s office, suggesting that the enhanced control over the milieu extended into the pattern of behavior supported by that milieu. However, this dynamic is not necessarily one based on dominance. Conroy and Sundstrom (1977) observed that when their participants’ opinions were similar, visitors actually spent more time speaking than residents, suggesting what the authors called a hospitality effect.
Thus, dominant behaviors may only emerge during certain types of negative interpersonal interactions, and the role of resident, defined by one’s relationship with the physical milieu, may instead involve more prosocial behavior during certain contexts. Classic work on the topic of prosociality by Latane and Darley (1968) predicts that helping is most likely to occur when bystanders notice an emergency and feel responsibility to act. It is reasonable to hypothesize that both of these factors would likely be enhanced in a territory, in light of the resident’s greater familiarity with what is typical in the environment and greater control over the activities within the setting. Moreover, as discussed earlier, the ecological approach explains home performance advantage in terms of greater attunement to the environmental invariants in the setting and more efficient detection of information-specifying affordances. Within this framework, facilitated behavioral regulation at home is predicted across a range of actions. Thus, one could hypothesize facilitated cooperative ability among hosts, rather than simply having an advantage during adversarial contests. Subtle measures of social attunement, such as perspective-taking and egocentric adjustments in eye gaze (e.g., Epley, Morewedge, & Keysar, 2004), may help to reveal changes in residents’ motivation and capacity to engage in prosocial behavior.
To summarize, a territory is not only a highly familiar space to a resident, it is also highly central to one’s self-concept. As a consequence, residents may alter, design, and personalize this environment in ways that reflect clear psychological motivations for identity, control, and intimacy. Ultimately, ownership over and use of one’s home environment will lead to a physical milieu that guides personality development, supports certain patterns of interactions with visitors, and either enhances or reduces their connection/commitment to partners. Thus, one’s sense of self and psychological well-being across multiple social domains is inextricably connected to this particular physical space.
The Design of Territories to Facilitate Certain Psychological Processes
As discussed above, individual psychological motives may guide how individuals construct and arrange their home. However, they may also explicitly seek out certain environments that they know, as a consequence of its architecture or design, will facilitate some desired cognitive or emotional state. For example, particular physical locations, such as mountains or oceans, have been shown capable of eliciting strong, transcendent emotional states like awe (Shiota, Thrash, Danvers, & Dombrowski, 2014). Similarly, some built environments, such as monumental religious architecture, are also capable of producing heightened emotional states (Joye & Verpooten, 2013; Meagher, 2018). Understanding which features of these locations can produce such effects represents an important goal for a scientific study of more effective design.
Although less intense, many environmental psychologists have noted that humans personalize their own spaces in large part to increase the likelihood of experiencing certain positive emotions (Gosling et al., 2008; Korpela, 2003; Korpela et al., 2001; Meagher, 2016; Rafaeli & Vilnai-Yavetz, 2004 ; Scheiberg, 1990). For example, exposure to identity-oriented markings—photographs of close others, previous achievements—can help restore feelings of self-worth, and behavioral residue (Gosling et al., 2008) from previous activities may provide evidence of earlier success in other tasks, thereby mitigating the damages of immediate failure.
More broadly, the affordances of one’s territory may provide a means of restoration, that is, recovery from emotional and cognitive depletion or stress (Hartig, Johansson, & Kylin, 2003; Staats, 2012). This may happen in a number ways. First, one’s home is the most typical location for sleeping, as bedrooms are designed specifically for that recovery activity. Second, the home is also where individuals spend the majority of their leisure time (Glyptis & Chambers, 1982). Having the freedom to arrange their own space, individuals will generally design it in such a way to facilitate the activities that they most enjoy. Third, territories offer a means of achieving privacy when needed. The experience of solitude has been shown to have a deactivating effect on emotional experiences (Nguyen et al., 2017), suggesting that seeking out an exclusively accessible space may be valuable when trying to attenuate stress and other negative feelings. In fact, Altman’s (1975, 1976b) theory of privacy regulation views the creation and possession of territories primarily as a means of achieving an optimum level of social interaction. Beyond just solitude, different types of privacy (e.g., intimacy, anonymity) may be achieved in different types of territories. For example, when seeking intimacy with another person, individuals prefer to do so in a primary territory, such as their home, but when they want to be alone, they are actually more likely to prefer temporary public territories, such as a secluded public park (Taylor & Ferguson, 1980).
Finally, the inherent nature of a territory may itself facilitate restoration as a product of its relationship with the resident. Kaplan (1995, 2001; Kaplan & Berman, 2010) developed attention restoration theory (ART) as a means of explaining how environments can facilitate mental and emotional recovery. According to ART, there are two distinct types of attention. The first, involuntary attention, is attention that requires no effort and that may be elicited by the particular objects in the environment, such as those that are exciting or interesting. In contrast, directed attention requires that the individual concentrate on something that is not particularly interesting, requiring some level of effort. Directed attention is therefore capable of weakening after extended use. Alcohol dramatically impairs directed attention, but does not appear to affect automatic attention (Abroms, Gottlob, & Fillmore, 2006), suggesting a functional and structural distinction between these two processes. ART proposes that self-regulatory failures, such as ego-depletion (Baumeister, Muraven, & Tice, 2000), result from the fatigue of excessive periods of directed attention, so recovery will occur when directed attention is able to rest. ART-based intervention strategies generally involve placing individuals in environments believed to be restorative (Staats, 2012), that is, environments where directed attention is minimized and involuntary attention is elicited by features of the physical setting. These types of places are believed to be capable of attracting so-called soft fascination, having features that attract involuntary attention without interfering with other thoughts. This quality is contrasted with hard fascination, which precludes simultaneously thinking about other things (e.g., watching violence or engrossing competition).
Based on these criteria, territories are quite likely to require minimal directed attention to function effectively, yet nevertheless capable of eliciting soft involuntary attention. A behavioral history in the setting provides residents with knowledge of its invariant structure and behavioral opportunities, a fact that eases motor and process skills (Hoppes et al., 2003; Provencher et al., 2012; Provencher et al., 2009; Raina et al., 2007). Because of past behavior physically and perceptually exploring the space, residents will be able to regulate themselves in it with little need for concerted attentional effort. This should make the need for directed attention outside of the immediate task at hand relatively minimal. Moreover, the self-associative nature of the territory is also likely to elicit the soft fascination characteristic of restorative environments. Individuals do tend to show perceptual and cognitive biases toward information relevant to the self (Cunningham, Turk, Macdonald, & Macrae, 2008; Turk, van Bussel, Waiter, & Macrae, 2011), so one’s own home environment will also likely be perceptually interesting to the occupant. In addition, this interest will be general, involuntary, and gentle enough so as to not interfere with other thoughts, as would occur with objects, events, or settings that evoke hard fascination. Thus, the ease of regulating within the space itself is likely to facilitate the process of emotional recovery.
Nevertheless, it is self-evident that not all territories are in fact restorative. For some people, the home is a source of stress, and it may lack access to much needed privacy. The space may also be designed in ways that fail to provide soft fascination, instead eliciting hard fascination from excessive stimulation. Open-office designs provide a clear illustration of this possibility. Once thought to be a valuable means of promoting interpersonal collaboration with colleagues, evidence now indicates that such spaces actually inhibit productivity by preventing the restorative benefits of privacy and personalization (Bernstein & Turban, 2018). Therefore, identifying ways to build and arrange spaces to increase the likelihood of eliciting positive residential responses represents an important intersection between psychology, architecture, and interior design. Such work will require understanding the types of needs or “ambiances” preferred by those who will be using the setting (e.g., Graham et al., 2015) while then investigating what features of an environment most effectively elicit that ambiance. For example, recent work suggests that qualities capable of eliciting soft fascination may be tied to particular optical features, such as fractality (Berman et al., 2014; Coburn et al., 2019). With a better understanding of these relationships, homes can then be designed in ways to enhance such qualities.
One interesting implication of this theory is that being in a home environment, assuming it is effectively restorative, may decrease the likelihood of regulatory failures, such as ego-depletion (Baumeister et al., 2000). Inzlicht and Schmeichel (2012) proposed that failures to exert self-control occur when one shifts attention and motivation away from information signaling the need to exert control and toward immediate gratification. Thus, people who believe that willpower is a limited capacity will be more apt to notice their own fatigue and thus weaken their motivation, whereas those who believe that willpower is unlimited are instead attuned to information indicating that they must work harder. Similarly, focusing on superordinate goals, beliefs, and values allows an individual to pay less attention to their mental fatigue and thereby stave off depletion (Fujita, Trope, Liberman, & Levin-Sagi, 2006; Hanif et al., 2012). Within a territory, a resident is surrounded by markers that reinforce his or her superordinate qualities, thereby reinforcing the resident’s sense of self-efficacy and history of long-term goals and behaviors. This environment may therefore succeed in providing what is essentially ambient self-affirmation for the resident, providing information to broaden global attention and greater belief in one’s own capacities (Schmeichel & Vohs, 2009).
Thus, territories provide an important emotional resource for occupants, both in their design and in relationship to the resident. These spaces afford specific behaviors that can aid in coping and mood regulation by being designed for activities that are beneficial (e.g., sleep), away from sources of stress, and enjoyable to the resident. Moreover, in designing this environment, the resident can have access to highly self-affirmative markings, and the history of behavior in the space means directed attention and concentration is not needed to function effectively. Future work is needed to explore the actual psychological benefits provided by being immersed in one’s own space, as well as the optimal design strategies to elicit these positive emotions.
Conclusion
Despite growing recognition in our field that psychological processes are closely tied to physical, bodily processes (Niedenthal et al., 2005; Pouw & Looren de Jong, 2015; Schubert & Semin, 2009; E. R. Smith & Semin, 2004), a fully embodied account must also acknowledge that any given behavior also depends on the supporting structure of the physical environment. Walking, for example, is a behavior that not only requires certain bodily functioning and neural capacities, but it also requires complementary environmental properties, such as a level surface, a lack of obstacles, and an adequate gravitational field. Similarly, social behavior will also be dependent on the physical structures that provide a supporting milieu for particular patterns of interaction.
The goal of this article has been to articulate an ecological framework for understanding the role of the physical milieu in social psychological processes. The research reviewed above, spanning social, perceptual, developmental, and cross-cultural psychology, outlines the person–environment mutuality that is central to this perspective. Culture, interpersonal interactions, and intergroup conflict, along with all other forms of social behavior, are embedded within physical contexts that provide the synomorphic milieu that makes these behaviors possible. Rather than treating physical structures as incidental to psychological topics, the ecological approach encourages researchers to evaluate the ways in which the physical world is critical for supporting existing patterns of cultural expression (Masuda et al., 2008; Miyamoto et al., 2006; Sng et al., 2018), social and relationship dynamics (Arriaga et al., 2004; Lohmann et al., 2003), and potential interpersonal and intergroup conflict (Bou Zeineddine & Pratto, 2017; G. Brown, 2009).
Some may question the need or value in accounting for the physical environment’s role as a necessary constituent in all social psychological effects or phenomena, arguing that theoretical parsimony is preferred in cases where fewer factors are needed to explain phenomena. Certainly, many psychological processes appear to be trans-situational. Nevertheless, many aspects of our environment are also trans-situational, thereby serving a critical function that may not be realized until it is suddenly absent. J. J. Gibson (1979), for example, pointed out that the visual perceptual system only functions as it does because of the specific invariant structure of ambient light and reflective surfaces that make up our world. In a similar way, more modern researchers have also begun to find evidence that basic cognitive processes, such as decision making (Goldstein & Gigerenzer, 2002; Pleskac & Hertwig, 2014) and analytic thinking (Miyamoto et al., 2006), likewise function in the way that they do only in relation to the largely invariant features of the environments humans now inhabit. Thus, although predicting certain effects and behaviors may still be possible when focusing only on the individual, a comprehensive understanding of such mechanisms will require evaluating the broader ecology that provides the necessary conditions for them to emerge and be maintained.
Moreover, the practical applications of developing a better understanding of how physical space specifies, facilitates, and constrains social goals and needs are readily apparent. Manipulating the physical properties of a setting can be a practical, nonintrusive means of implementing behavioral interventions in the field, which is why environmental psychologists have a long history of applied work in a variety of settings, such as schools, prisons, and businesses. Notably, Lewin (1946) himself pointed out that a basic yet powerful deterrent to intergroup hostility was housing designed to promote integration, arguing that psychologically sensitive environmental design represents a prime example of what he called action research—theory-based research that should have meaningful consequences in the real world. Thus, more than being a purely philosophical exercise, an ecological perspective of psychology may reveal more effective means of eliciting meaningful behavior change (Thaler & Sunstein, 2009).
A particular emphasis has been placed in this document on the role of territories in social psychological experience. The current literature on this topic, being heavily indebted to earlier ethological work, has remained largely preoccupied with competitive aggression and defense. Instead, I have advocated for research that explores the relational properties that define the resident–territory relationship, which will help to reveal differences in adaptive functioning across a much wider range of human activity. Already, a burgeoning research literature in social psychology has provided some critical linkages between territory design and subsequent emotional experience (Graham et al., 2015; Meagher, 2016, 2018) and identity processes (Arriaga et al., 2004; Gosling et al., 2008, Gosling et al., 2002; Ledgerwood et al., 2007; Lohmann et al., 2003). Even so, in light of the fundamental role these places play in people’s everyday lives, our understanding of these spaces—particularly in terms of their many embedded social processes—is currently quite minimal. For example, one of the most frequent types of social behaviors done within territories is hosting visitors. But what characterizes the behaviors and motives that constitute hosting? To what extent do hosts function and regulate themselves in ways that distinguish them from their guests? Despite the cross-cultural ubiquity of entertaining guests in one’s territory, existing research on such questions is largely nonexistent.
It is my hope that this document will encourage greater consideration by researchers of the critical role played by the physical environment in this and all other types of social psychological processes. As Barker (1979) stated, “a science that knows no more about the distribution in nature of the phenomena of which it is concerned than laymen is a defective science” (p. 2150). All social psychological activity is itself distributed in nature, occurring in nonarbitrary physical locations that support the activity under consideration. Because of this fact, better understanding the role of these settings in all types of human activity—whether competitive, cooperative, or individual—will vastly enhance how well social psychological theories can describe and explain cognition, behavior, and performance as it occurs in the places that humans actually live and act within.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.