HUMAN ECOLOGY AS AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONCEPT
26
psychology as with the other ecologically oriented social sciences, with
an operationally or functionally defined environment, or, as Willems
(1965) phrases it, a concern with the environment as “that total set of
factors that can activate behavior”.
Sells (1966) claimed that there are “no insuperable obstacles to
effective [real world] field observations” but did underline the difficulties
in recording behavior under the complexities and distractions of natural
circumstances and the problem of encoding the environment. He ends by
asserting that “until we can assign to environmental variables the
proportions of variance in behavior for which they account, our understanding of behavior will be incomplete. When this is accomplished, the
goals of an ecologic approach to the science of psychology will have been
achieved. ”
There are other difficulties. Ecological psychology is, like other
subsets of human ecology, difficult to define, or as Proshansky et al.
(1970) phrased it: “the only really satisfactory way . . . to define [it] is in
terms of theory; and the simple fact is that as yet there is no adequate
theory, or even the beginnings of theory, of environmental psychology
on which such a definition might be based”. The sentence could have
been quoted from a general synthesis on human ecology: there is so little
theory on which to base an adequate definition.
There are some constraining concepts, however, in ecological psychology, that provide the nucleus of a definition, though there is no
general agreement on which are the most definitive or even, in some
cases, which should be included as definitive.
According to Barker (1965) the core problem of ecological psychology
is to identify-and examine the role of-non-psychological inputs into
human behavior. By non-psychological, he means the molar (larger)
ecological environment. This is defined as consisting of those naturally(?)
occurring phenomena (1) outside a person’s skin, (2) with which his
molar actions are coupled, but (3) which function according to laws that
are incommensurate with the laws that govern his molar behavior.
Willems (1965) sharpens the focus by ascribing to these ongoing,
everyday behavior phenomena the tendency “. . . to focus and pattern
in and around clusters of activities and places . . . to bunch up, so to
speak, in organized clusters or units of the environment”. He takes this
a bit further with a claim that in terms of behavioral response “persons
are . . . confronted with patterned and structured environments. The
environment comes in units.” These units are the behavior settings, “the
discoverable, describable units of the everyday ecological environments
of persons”. The term behavior settings originated with the Kansas field
studies of Barker and Wright (1955).
There are in ecological psychology problems of agreement over
26
psychology as with the other ecologically oriented social sciences, with
an operationally or functionally defined environment, or, as Willems
(1965) phrases it, a concern with the environment as “that total set of
factors that can activate behavior”.
Sells (1966) claimed that there are “no insuperable obstacles to
effective [real world] field observations” but did underline the difficulties
in recording behavior under the complexities and distractions of natural
circumstances and the problem of encoding the environment. He ends by
asserting that “until we can assign to environmental variables the
proportions of variance in behavior for which they account, our understanding of behavior will be incomplete. When this is accomplished, the
goals of an ecologic approach to the science of psychology will have been
achieved. ”
There are other difficulties. Ecological psychology is, like other
subsets of human ecology, difficult to define, or as Proshansky et al.
(1970) phrased it: “the only really satisfactory way . . . to define [it] is in
terms of theory; and the simple fact is that as yet there is no adequate
theory, or even the beginnings of theory, of environmental psychology
on which such a definition might be based”. The sentence could have
been quoted from a general synthesis on human ecology: there is so little
theory on which to base an adequate definition.
There are some constraining concepts, however, in ecological psychology, that provide the nucleus of a definition, though there is no
general agreement on which are the most definitive or even, in some
cases, which should be included as definitive.
According to Barker (1965) the core problem of ecological psychology
is to identify-and examine the role of-non-psychological inputs into
human behavior. By non-psychological, he means the molar (larger)
ecological environment. This is defined as consisting of those naturally(?)
occurring phenomena (1) outside a person’s skin, (2) with which his
molar actions are coupled, but (3) which function according to laws that
are incommensurate with the laws that govern his molar behavior.
Willems (1965) sharpens the focus by ascribing to these ongoing,
everyday behavior phenomena the tendency “. . . to focus and pattern
in and around clusters of activities and places . . . to bunch up, so to
speak, in organized clusters or units of the environment”. He takes this
a bit further with a claim that in terms of behavioral response “persons
are . . . confronted with patterned and structured environments. The
environment comes in units.” These units are the behavior settings, “the
discoverable, describable units of the everyday ecological environments
of persons”. The term behavior settings originated with the Kansas field
studies of Barker and Wright (1955).
There are in ecological psychology problems of agreement over