Environment and Behavior

This article focuses on the first stage of the mobility decision-making process-the consideration of moving. A social-ecological model has been developed to analyze the relationship between a stated decision to move and the objective hazardousness of one's present location due to the threat of a damaging earthquake. A unique feature of this model is the inclusion of subjective earthquake-related factors in order to determine the extent to which these mediating variables improve the explanation of mobility plans.

The research explores the manner in which perception and definition shape legislative environmental attitudes. The central hypothesis is that a legislator's perceptual orientation of air pollution predicts his policy position. A survey of Florida state legislators revealed two competing formulations of air pollution. One saw pollution as essentially a question of economics. The second saw pollution as a health and environmental issue. Scales were constructed to measure each of these dimensions. It was found that those legislators scoring high on the health and environmental dimension: (1) were less receptive to environmental deterioration, (2) found present controls less adequate, (3) saw a wider and more beneficial scope of social outcomes, (4) prosecuted their claims more vigorously, even in the face of opposition from constituents, and (5) advocated an expanded governmental approach to the problem. Those policy actors with an economic orientation to air pollution functioned as polar opposites in each instance. In addition, it was found that air pollution stances were not easily transferable to other environmental issues such as water pollution or natural resource conservation.

A field study investigated the role of knowledge, experience, and warning in medi-ating the stress associated with urban flooding. Among residents of an urban floodplain, knowledge about flooding was associated with less trauma during the last flood and reluctance to support indiscriminate government intervention. Increased prior warning of a flood, however, was related to intensified residual fear and feelings of desperation, to more frequent somatic manifestations of stress, and to greater support for all government intervention programs. Previous flood experience (especially recurring experience) was associated with increased fear, depression, and health-stress outcomes. Commitment to adaptive community intervention programs was related to recency of one's flood experience. Having flood insurance was unrelated to stress measures.

Awareness of a small business neighborhood was studied by driving 40 college students through a 1.7-mile route. Twenty other students received no ride. Half of each group had a high frequency of previous exposure to the area (mean number of times in the area = 159.9) and the other half had low frequency (mean = 5.3). The ride significantly increased the number of items mentioned in a free recall task and the number of pictures positively identified in a recognition task. Previous exposure to the area affected only recognition. The kinds of things recalled and recognized are discussed in terms of a utilitarian versus aesthetic orientation to the environment.

The "Map in the Head" metaphor states that knowledge of large-scale space is isomorphic to the information stored in a graphical map: That is, corresponding operations are used to store and retrieve information. The purpose of this essay is to look carefully at the "Map in the Head" metaphor to see the limits of its applicability. There are two types of experimental results that are difficult to accommodate within this metaphor. First, instead of being integrated into a single map, spatial knowledge can fall into disconnected components, with little or no relation between the components. Second, knowledge of routes (and other spatial facts) may be represented asymmetrically, so that a route can be followed in one direction but not in the other. The first set of results leads us to replace the simple "Map in the Head" with a more complex and sophisticated metaphor including separate metrical and topological components. The second set of results suggests that even the more sophisticated "Map in the Head" is built from computational structures that occasionally reveal their nonmaplike properties. A computational model is presented for assimilating observations gathered during travel, first into a description of the particular route, then into representations for the topological and metrical features of the environment.

You-are-here maps are standard aids for newcomers to a complex terrain. A precisely constructed map with a properly affixed you-are-here symbol, however, is not sufficient. Two principles, one of structure matching and one of orientation, must be considered in order to maximize the map's usefulness. Indeed, neglect of these can make the map misleading. These principles lead to the following set of recommendations: (1) provide salient, coordinate labels in both the terrain and the map; (2) place the map near an asymmetrical part of the terrain; (3) design the you-are-here symbol to indicate map-terrain correspondence; (4) align the map with the terrain; (5) be redundant, that is, use as many of these supplements as possible.

This article develops an approach to identifying preferences of residents for alternative strategies of service provision, given a limited budget for the supply of services. Using a game format, the approach requires residents to indicate the services they would improve and the services they would trade off given the available financial resources. The method is demonstrated for a rural municipality in sourthern Ontario, Canada. The results provide an indication of the way in which the residents would like to see their taxes apportioned for service provision and are analyzed for differences in constrained preferences within the community.