This is my favorite paper from my dissertation and hopefully it plants the seed for more exciting research in the future! We started doing this because we think features of the environment will guide behavior in those spaces, and we’re working on that right now. Check back in a bit?
There’s so much cool work on environments and we stand on the shoulders of giants. Our hope is that these 4 factors can serve as a shared foundation to systematically compare and connect findings across the many disciplines studying environments.
These factors were validated on behavioral intentions. In addition, digital manipulation of environment images revealed that our impressions of the environment are rooted in its features. Doesn’t the environment feel a little colder when there’s snow on the ground?
We had people describe environments, then had other people rate hundreds of environments on those descriptors. Exploratory factor analyses revealed the 4 factors: density, desirability, light, and temperature. This was consistent in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
New paper out in JPSP with @erichehman.bsky.social! We asked: What is the framework underlying our impressions of environments? Our large bottom-up study shows that people pay attention to 4 factors. We’re calling it the Environment Impressions Model: doi.org/10.1037/pspa...