Environment, Cognition, and Action: The Need for Integration

Abstract

What we know and understand about our surroundings influences our evaluations of and behaviors in the physical environment. In addition, our reasons for using places, our goals and personal plans, bias the manner in which we acquire and store knowledge of places. The extent to which places afford the goals and plans we bring to them also affects environmental assessments. How much we like a place is colored by how well it meets certain functional objectives. Yet scholarly analysis of each of these topics has proceeded largely in isolation. The principal objective of this volume is to promote more thinking and analysis about the integration of these three, heretofore largely distinct areas of scholarly inquiry—namely environmental cognition, environmental assessment, and decision making and action in real-world situations. We are not attempting a broad theoretical integration across the many realms of human-environment studies as outlined for example in The Handbook of Environmental Psychology (Stokols & Altman, 1987). Throughout the present volume there is a distinctly cognitive bias, emphasizing the role of cognition as it influences assessment and action rather than studying how action or assessment might impact cognition. This cognitive perspective reflects the editors’ own intellectual training (experimental psychology) and also mirrors the current predominant view within each of the three areas of inquiry we investigate. However, as we discuss throughout this volume, this cognitive perspective may detract from a fuller understanding of how and in what way people interrelate with their physical surroundings (see also Saegert & Winkel, 1990, for a sociocultural critique of the cognitive perspective in environmental psychology). Furthermore, we focus our analysis of cognition, assessment, and action at the individual level rather than aggregating responses intended to characterize the environment at a societal or group level. Given that the principal objective of this volume is to promote integration across three areas of scholarship that have operated largely in isolation from one another, we begin by first describing each of these three main areas of inquiry. This is followed by a brief analysis of some preliminary attempts at integration. We conclude with a description of how the present volume is organized.