ABSTRACT
The chapter provides an overview of environmental and architectural psychology, what it is and how it works, beginning with two observations: it is more reliable to predict someone’s behaviour from knowing where they are than who they are; and, all environments are the result of human decision-making. Those two observations show that environmental psychology is central to understanding behaviour and the settings it takes place in. The discipline grew out of the work of psychologists and others trying to solve environmental and design challenges during the 1950s and 1960s. The evolution of the environmental psychology reflects that applied, multidisciplinary orientation. The chapter includes sections describing key related environmental disciplines, and an account of the history and pioneers of the subject, primarily focusing on the UK. The way in which person-environment relations are conceptualized has fundamental implications for the questions psychologists and others ask, and the way in which research is designed to answer those questions is discussed. The chapter looks at the evolution of these frameworks from the direct causality of environment determinism to the transactional approach in which person-environment relations are conceptualized as a mutual transaction during which people actively, psychologically construct their settings.
