ABSTRACT
Environmental psychology has been an active area of concern for the past 20 years. It deals with the impact of the physical and natural environment on individual and group behavior. However, the major focus of this discipline is on demonstrating and understanding the influence of environmental variables, and not on understanding individual or group behavior. Research in the area of groups has typically focused on the nature of group processes and ignored the potential impact of features of the physical environment on such processes. This is understandable as most of these studies are done in environmentally uninteresting laboratory settings which are held constant across the experimental conditions. Yet in these studies some of the laboratory rooms may have one-way mirrors, and they may vary considerably in size, shape, and esthetics. Even if these features are held constant in an experiment, they might influence the generality of the results obtained. For example, mirrors and room size have been found to have a variety of effects on emotion and behavior. Mirrors may increase self-awareness and in tum influence a variety of behaviors such as aggression, conformity, and task performance ( cf. Wicklund, 1980). Small rooms have been found to affect task performance, social inclinations, competitive behavior, and jury decisions relative to larger rooms (cf. Paulus, 1980).
