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Guidance and counseling

Notes rather than controlled experiments. Some of the minute-by-minute observations of Kansan children
from morning to night, jotted down by young and maternal graduate students, may be the most
intimate and poignant documents in social science. Barker spent his career expanding on what he
called ecological psychology, identifying these behavior settings, and publishing accounts such as
One Boy’s Day (1952) and Midwest and Its Children (1955).

24.6 Applications of Environmental Approach

Impact on the built environment
Environmental psychologists rejected the laboratory-experimental paradigm because it of its
simplification and skewed view of the cause-and-effect relationships of human’s behaviors and
experiences. Environmental psychologists examine how one or more parameters produce an effect
while other measures are controlled. It is impossible to manipulate real-world settings in a laboratory.
Environmental psychology is oriented towards influencing the work of design professionals
(architects, engineers, interior designers, urban planners, etc.) and thereby improving the human
environment.
On a civic scale, efforts towards improving pedestrian landscapes have paid off, to some extent,
from the involvement of figures like Jane Jacobs and Copenhagen’s Jan Gehl. One prime figure here
is the late writer and researcher William H. Whyte. His still-refreshing and perceptive “City”, based
on his accumulated observations of skilled Manhattan pedestrians, provides steps and patterns of
use in urban plazas.
The role and impact of architecture on human behavior is debated within the architectural profession.
Views range from : supposing that people will adapt to new architectures and city forms; believing
that architects cannot predict the impact of buildings on human and therefore should base decisions
on other factors; to those who undertake detailed precedent studies of local building types and how
they are used by that society.
Environmental psychology has conquered the whole architectural genre which is concerned with
retail stores and any other commercial venues that have the power to manipulate the mood and
behavior of customers (e.g. stadiums, casinos, malls, and now airports). From Philip Kotler’s landmark
paper on Atmospherics and Alan Hirsch’s “Effects of Ambient Odors on Slot-Machine Usage in a
Las Vegas Casino”, through the creation and management of the Gruen transfer, retail relies heavily
on psychology, original research, focus groups, and direct observation. One of William Whyte’s
students, Paco Underhill, makes a living as a “shopping anthropologist”. Most of this advanced
research remains a trade secret and proprietary.

24.7 Challenges of Environmental Approach
The field saw significant research findings and a fair surge of interest in the late 1970s and early
1980s, but has seen challenges of nomenclature, obtaining objective and repeatable results, scope
and the fact that some research rests on underlying assumptions about human perception, which
is not fully understood. Being an interdisciplinary field is difficult because it lacks a solid definition
and purpose. It is hard for the field to fit into organizational structures. In the words of Guido
Francescato, speaking in 2000, environmental psychology encompasses a “somewhat bewildering
array of disparate methodologies, conceptual orientations, and interpretations... making it difficult
to delineate, with any degree of precision, just what the field is all about and what might it contribute
to the construction of society and the unfolding of history.”
Environmental psychology has not received nearly enough supporters to be considered an
interdisciplinary field within psychology. Harold M. Proshanksy was one of the founders of
environmental psychology and was quoted as saying “As I look at the field of environmental
psychology today, I am concerned about its future. It has not, since its emergence in the early 1960s

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