
Environmental Psychology elective at Leiden University (2020-2021)
Lecture 2: Going Into Town (the urban environment)
Pros and cons of living in an urban environment
+ More employment opportunity
+Cities are exciting, lively and diverse
+More cultural, educational and medical resources
- Crowdedness, information overload.
- High density
-Pollution
-Crime
Crowdedness and density
- Crowding is a personally defined, subjective feeling that too many others are around
- Density: people per square meter. Not identical to the subjective state of crowdedness
- Proximity to others can have even more adverse effects than density because of personal space invasion. Example: having to sit next to people on the train.
- Study about this phenomena: Evans, G.W., & Wener, R.E. (2007). Crowding and personal space invasion on the train: Please don't make me sit in the middle.
- Crowding became interpreted and studied as a specific stressor, involving:
- Antecedents
- Affective reaction
- Behavorial response
Antecedents
- Goal blocking (traffic jam, waiting in line)
- Threat of resource loss (food, shelter)
- Loss of control (unwanted interaction)
Affective reaction:
- Anger, annoyance (predominantly negative)
- Physiological reactions indicating increased arousal and stress
Behavioral response:
- Withdrawal, avoidance
- Filtering out information
- Changing social environment by increased selectivity in social contacts, creating norms
- Changing physical environment by partitioningspace, putting up fences, curtains etc.
How to deal with crowding?
- Residences: e.g. installing screens or walls
Amusement parks: queuing devices
Campings: zoning (grouping of like minded people)
- Prisons: huge differences between one- and more-person cells. Size is relatively unimportant. So, it is better to have one person cells, even if they are smaller
Information overload
Article on information overload in cities: Milgram (1970). The experience of living in cities.
- Decrease time per input
- Ignore low-priority input
- Shift to a more passive approach
- Impede access
Change in social responsibility:
Study: Allow strangers in the home; as a function of city size and gender (DV=% access allowed):
- Civility: less or different in character in cities
- Anonymity: blessing or curse? Anonymity makes people trust eachother less, but there is also less social pressure on people (less gossiping etc)
Article: Moser, G., & Corroyer, D. (2001). Politeness in the urban environment: Is city life still synonymous with civility?:
- Slightly different premise: Civility is an urban phenomenon
- Tacit rules (social norms) governing social behaviors regulate social interaction
- Civility is a form of politeness
- Impersonal, practiced in interaction with unknown others, different from helping, which is based on perception of individual characteristics
- To be found in public spaces of cities
- “Behavior in the city is, in fact, paradoxical: The individual has to cooperate socially to maintain his anonymity.”
Empirical test: holding open door for next visitor:
Two hypotheses:
Politeness is less frequent in large compared to smaller city (confirmed)
Politeness is not sensitive to immediate population density (not confirmed)
- Design: 2x2x2
- Size (Paris vs. Nantes)
- Density (high vs. low)
- Social norm by example (holding door open vs. not)
- Method: observations
- Findings:
- Civility suffers in large cities
- Density lowers civility
- Social norm buffers the negative effect of large cities on civility
Privacy and civility: waiting room observation study:
- Context: in a row of chairs, where do people sit? seat 2 is closest to where the other person sits, seat 8 is the farthest away
- Seat 4 was most popular sitting location. Why?
- It is impolite to sit too far away, but also privacy is important. Implicit norm for civility and privacy
Article: Canter & Larkin (1993). The environmental range of serial rapists:
- Crimes are committed in a way that is environmentally/spatially meaningful
- Two options:
- Criminal acts are done at a specific location away from the criminal’s home area (e.g., city center or regular routes)
- Criminal’s home forms a base area for the criminal acts
- Testing and outcome
- Sample: 45 rapists
- Outcomes: Circle hypothesis: 91% of crimes committed within circle (defined by two most distant crimes) with home as base within Circle.
- Range hypothesis: max. distance to crime from home is strongly correlated with max. distance between crimes (r = .93).
- This confirms Marauder model
Drug dealing study by Bernasco & Jacques (2015):
When dealing, drugs dealers:
- Walk, don’t stand
- Use stash spots to hide drugs
- Interact a lot with police officers patrolling - how come? they don't want to stand out and be in less crowded places
- Are aware of relevant, very small differences in physical features, social conditions, camera angle, time
Kuo & Sullivan (2001). Aggression and violence in the inner city. Effects of environment via mental fatigue.:
Premises:
- Life in inner city is taxing, especially for the less privileged:
- Living in poor quality housing (small, noisy, unsafe)
- Low income --> few resources
- Crowded
- This creates, among other things, mental fatigue
- In the study, people were moved out to their homes to different locations. Some to a natural environment, some towards a more urban environment
- Aggression toward partner less in Nature condition
- Aggression toward child less in Nature condition
- Attentional functioning (DSB):
- worse in No Nature condition
- related to aggression
- mediator of Nature – Aggression relation
- Mediation by attentional fatigue:
Natural vs non-natural environment --> attentional fatigue --> aggression
Keizer, K., Lindenberg, S., & Steg, L. (2008). The spreading of disorder:
"Broken windows theory”:Stating (1) that disorder is more likely when descriptive norm is in conflict with injunctive norm and (2) that disorder may spread to other forms of behavior: “cross-norm inhibition”
- Experiment 1: Does graffiti increase littering? Yes, littering went from 33% to 69%
- Experiment 3: Do unreturned shopping carts increase littering? Yes, from 30% to 58%
- Experiment 6: Does littering increase theft? Yes, from 13% to 25%
If a norm is broken in a public place, other social norms are more easily broken also. The effect has long-term consequences also (see: Dur & Vollaard (2015). The Power of a Bad Example: A Field Experiment in Household Garbage Disposal)
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