Behavioural Approach in Geography (Behaviouralism)

• Behavioural geography studies human activity in space by asking how people perceive, learn about and decide within their environment, rather than assuming how an ideal decision-maker ought to act.
  • It works at the disaggregate scale: the individual or the small group, whose perceptions and choices differ even in the same setting.
• Its core claim is simple: people act on the world as they perceive it, not on the world as it objectively is. Explaining spatial patterns therefore means explaining the cognitive processes behind them.
• It arose in the 1960s inside human geography as a critique of spatial science from within, and became one of the first strands of the critical revolution.

Emergence of the Behavioural Approach

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Disillusionment with Spatial Science

• By the mid-1960s, statistics and models were accepted tools, and the dispute over systematic versus regional geography had settled into acceptance of both.
• Yet the models of the quantitative revolution described reality poorly:
  • Settlement patterns matched Central Place Theory only loosely, and theory explained the spatial organization of society weakly; its predictive power was low.
  • The models rested on unreal axioms: an omniscient, profit-maximising “economic man” moving freely across an isotropic plain.
  • They could not explain why a flood-plain farmer stays on after repeated floods, or why shoppers skip the nearest market.
• The disillusionment was with the axioms, not with science. Behaviouralists kept the goal of generalisation but wanted it built on realistic postulates about human behaviour.
• The intellectual source shifted from economics to psychology. Behaviouralism in the social sciences had spilled over from the behavioural sciences, and geography absorbed it.

Forerunners

• Older roots: attention to how people see their surroundings is far older than the 1960s.
  • Élisée Reclus insisted that man is no passive agent. The French possibilists stressed choice, and American landscape and human-ecology writers treated people as active shapers of the land.
  • Carl Sauer showed people acting by habit and experience as much as by calculation.
• John Kirtland Wright (1947), in “Terrae Incognitae”, called the mind the last unexplored territory and proposed geosophy, the study of geographical ideas held by all kinds of people.
  • David Lowenthal’s “Geography, Experience and Imagination” (1961) revived the idea for a wider audience.
• William Kirk (1952) set out one of the first behavioural models. He drew on Gestalt psychology to separate the phenomenal (objective) environment from the behavioural (perceived) environment.
  • Published in an Indian jubilee volume, it was largely ignored during the quantitative upswing. Kirk restated it in 1963.
  • Wright, White, Kirk and Lowenthal belonged to no major research group of the 1960s, so the new behaviouralists rarely cited them. The movement had to be relaunched from within spatial science.
• Gilbert F. White’s thesis Human Adjustment to Floods (1945) founded the Chicago school of hazard research, which put the flood-plain dweller’s perception at the centre of policy.
• Kenneth Boulding’s The Image (1956) argued that people build images of the world through everyday contact and act on those images.
• Herbert A. Simon (1956–57) replaced perfect rationality with bounded rationality: decision-makers with limited information and limited ability to process it seek a satisfactory, not an optimal, outcome. He called this satisficing.

Wolpert’s Satisficer (1964) and the Spread of the Approach

• Julian Wolpert’s “The Decision Process in Spatial Context” (Annals of the AAG, 1964), based on farms in central Sweden, is usually taken as the start of the movement.
  • Actual labour productivity fell well short of the potential optimum. The farmers had incomplete information, lower aspirations and an aversion to risk.
  • They were satisficers, not optimisers: rational, but within the limits of what they knew and valued.
• Wolpert’s migration study (1965) introduced place utility and action space: a migrant compares the satisfaction of the present place with that of places he knows of, not with all places. The gravity model could not capture this.
• Wolpert’s later work (1970) on the siting of public facilities found such decisions to be compromises or stress responses, often the rejection of sites by groups strong enough to veto them, rather than optimal choices.
• Probability entered locational analysis through game theory and information theory. Peter Gould’s study (1963) of farmers in Ghana’s middle belt treated crop choice as a game against uncertain rainfall.
• Institutionalisation: a special session at the AAG meeting of 1968 led to Kevin Cox and Reginald Golledge’s Behavioral Problems in Geography (1969).
  • Golledge, Brown and Williamson’s 1972 review listed five research fields: decision-making and choice, information flows and diffusion, learning, perception, and voting behaviour.
  • John Gold’s An Introduction to Behavioural Geography (1980) consolidated the field.
• Two kinds of early study dominated:
  • Analysis of overt behaviour, usually travel patterns, observed and generalised inductively.
  • Studies of environmental perception, such as mental maps and hazard images.
  • Both needed primary data from social surveys, which drew geographers closer to sociologists and psychologists.

Behaviouralism and the Quantitative Revolution

• Behaviouralism was a refinement of spatial science, not a break with it. It accepted the scientific method but rejected two things:
  • Economic rationality: human values, culture, beliefs and sentiments now entered the explanation.
  • Aggregate generalisation: people were no longer points on a plain, and study shifted from populations to individuals.
• It moved from deductive model-building to inductive generalisation, built from primary data on ongoing processes.

Concepts and Models of Man–Environment Interaction

Objective and Behavioural Environment

• Space has a dual character:
  • Objective (phenomenal) environment: the world of actuality, measurable by direct means.
  • Behavioural environment: the world as an individual perceives it, open to study only indirectly.
• However partial or distorted, the behavioural environment is the basis of decisions.
• Kurt Koffka (Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935) illustrated it with a Swiss tale.
  • A rider crosses a snow-covered plain on a winter night and reaches an inn. He learns that he has just ridden over the frozen Lake Constance, and drops dead from shock.
  • His behavioural environment was solid ground. Had he perceived the lake, he would have behaved differently.

Boulding’s Image and Downs’ Framework

• Boulding’s conventional model: environment → image → behaviour, with behaviour feeding back to change both environment and image.
• Roger Downs (1970) elaborated it into a perception model:
  • Information from the real world enters through the senses.
  • It passes through filters of personality, culture, values, language and social position, which together form the image (mental map).
  • The image guides a decision: either act, or search for more information. The resulting behaviour alters the real world and starts a new cycle.

Kirk’s Behavioural Model

• Kirk held that the same information carries different meanings for people of different social, cultural and economic backgrounds, even in the same physical setting.
  • Kirk himself treated the behavioural environment, once formed, as the basis of rational action. He joined Gestalt perception to the older belief in rational decision-making.
• Indian example: in a single village of the western Indo-Gangetic plain, farming castes read the same land differently.
  • A tractor-owning Jat household may favour sugarcane and think 10 acres small. A Saini market gardener may find five acres ample for vegetables. An Ahir family may give land to fodder for dairying.
  • The objective environment is identical; the behavioural environments differ.

Kates and Hazard Perception

• Robert Kates (1962), of the Chicago hazard school, asked why people choose to live on flood-prone land.
• His scheme rested on four assumptions:
  • People are rational, but act on the environment as perceived.
  • People make choices, though many become habitual after a few conscious decisions.
  • Choices rest on knowledge, which is never complete.
  • Information is evaluated by set criteria: past practice for habitual choices, explicit rules for conscious ones.
• Burton, Kates and White (1968) gave hazard studies a framework: occupance of hazard zones, range of adjustments, perception of risk, adoption of adjustments, and the optimal set of adjustments.
  • Hazard research stood out as policy-oriented and led by geographers themselves.
  • From Chicago it spread to Toronto, Colorado and Clark universities, and to cross-cultural comparison under the IGU’s Commission on Man and Environment.
  • Its weakness was the reverse of its strength: working within geography, it drew less on other disciplines than the rest of behavioural work.
• Indian relevance: households on the Kosi and Brahmaputra flood plains return after floods because fertile land and kin ties outweigh perceived risk.
  • Perception can also be reshaped. Before Cyclone Fani (May 2019), Odisha moved about 1.2 million people within 24 hours, aided by accurate warnings and long-built trust in shelters.

Pred’s Behavioural Matrix

• Allan Pred, in Behavior and Location (1967, 1969), offered a framework for locational decisions to replace economic man.
• The behavioural matrix has two axes:
  • Quantity and quality of information available to the decision-maker.
  • Ability to use that information.
• Economic man sits in the corner of perfect information and perfect ability. Real decision-makers are spread across the matrix according to their aspirations, experience, group norms and location.
• Dynamics:
  • Decision-makers learn and move towards the optimal corner. The unsuccessful are weeded out.
  • Parametric shocks (new technology, market change) push them back, so an optimal pattern rarely emerges.
  • A poorly placed decision-maker can still choose a good site by chance. The matrix predicts probabilities, not certainties.
• David Harvey (Explanation in Geography, 1969) found the matrix ambiguous and hard to operationalise, and preferred normative or stochastic location theory.

Porteous and Sonnenfeld: Layered Environments

• Douglas Porteous (1977) distinguished three environments:
  • Phenomenal: physical objects.
  • Personal: images of the phenomenal environment held by individuals.
  • Contextual: the culture, beliefs and expectations that shape behaviour.
• Joseph Sonnenfeld (1972) proposed four nested levels:
  • Geographical environment: the whole world external to the individual.
  • Operational environment: the part that affects a person, whether or not he is aware of it.
  • Perceptual environment: the part he is aware of, through direct or indirect experience.
  • Behavioural environment: the part of the perceived world that draws a response.
• Societies with better information and technology have a wider operational and perceptual environment, and so draw on more resources. Societies with limited information rely more on traditional behaviour.

Mental Maps

• A mental (cognitive) map is the image of places that a person stores and draws on to judge desirability, plan routines and decide. It mixes what one knows about places with how one feels about them.
• Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), based on sketch maps and interviews in Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles, found five elements of legibility:
  • Paths (streets, railways), edges (shores, walls), districts (areas of recognisable character), nodes (junctions, squares) and landmarks (towers, monuments).
• Peter Gould (1966) mapped residential preferences of students and showed regular “preference surfaces”. The theme was developed in Gould and Rodney White’s Mental Maps (1974).
  • Students everywhere rated their home area highly. Preference fell off with distance and information, and some regions carried strong positive or negative stereotypes.
  • Gould argued that if spatial behaviour is the concern, the mental images people hold of space may hold the key to the patterns they create.
• Downs and David Stea (Image and Environment, 1973) consolidated cognitive mapping. Mental maps vary with age, class, gender, familiarity and culture.
  • In Indian cities, a newcomer’s map of Delhi may be built on metro lines and malls, a lifelong resident’s on old bazaars, mohallas and shrines.
• Uses: planning legible cities, siting shops and services, understanding migration choices and wayfinding.

Objectives, Approaches and Features

Objectives and Assumptions

• Objectives:
  • Build alternatives to normative location theory, grounded in how people actually decide.
  • Define the cognitive environment behind decisions and give psychological and social theories of behaviour a spatial dimension.
  • Shift emphasis from aggregate populations to individuals and small groups.
  • Seek methods beyond standard statistics that can reveal the latent structure of data and decisions.
  • Prefer process to structure in explanation, and generate primary data rather than rely on published statistics.
  • Work across disciplines in theory-building and problem-solving.
• Three working assumptions underpin these aims:
  • People hold environmental images.
  • Researchers can identify those images accurately.
  • A strong link exists between image and actual behaviour.

Approaches to the Study

• Analytical (overt behaviour) approach: studies observable spatial behaviour such as travel, shopping and migration, treated as a dependent variable explained by measurable factors. It uses statistical techniques and stays close to positivism.
• Cognitive approach: seeks the mental constructs behind overt behaviour, through mental maps, preference surfaces and attitude scaling. Linking cognition to action has proved harder.
• Downs (1970) identified three lines of image research:
  • Structural: what spatial information is stored, and how it is organised.
  • Evaluative: which attributes people value, and how they weigh them in decisions.
  • Preference: how places are ranked, as in Gould’s residential preference surfaces.
• Methods: questionnaires, sketch maps, repertory grids, travel diaries and observation, leading to inductive generalisation.

Salient Features

• Dual environment: objective and behavioural, with the behavioural one decisive.
  • People act on reality as perceived, so the same physical setting can carry many behavioural environments.
• Individual focus: each person is a goal-directed actor whose acts alter the environment, however slightly.
  • Studying individuals, rather than institutions or whole cultures, explains why neighbours in the same setting behave differently. Many such studies supply the raw material for inductive generalisation.
• Two-way interaction: people shape the environment and are shaped by it. Behaviour ends one chain of events and starts the next, unlike one-way determinism.
• Multidisciplinary: psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics and planning feed the subject. This brought “derived diversity” in concepts and methods.
• Positivist core: it seeks generalisations and models, only on more realistic postulates.
• Broad scope: hazards, resource use, shopping, migration, urban images, voting and innovation, bridging the natural and social sciences.

Applications

• Movement studies:
  • Consumer behaviour: the nearest market is not always the preferred one. Image, habit and trust count.
    • Many Indian households bypass the neighbourhood kirana for a distant mall or weekly haat, depending on price image, variety, credit and social ties. Transport and retail planning must allow for this.
  • Migration: place utility and stress thresholds explain who moves and where. Rural–urban flows in India follow perceived opportunity carried through kin networks.
  • In rich countries, the perceived congestion and pollution of cities fed counter-urbanisation towards small towns and the countryside.
  • Intra-urban moves: residential moves within a city follow life-cycle stress and neighbourhood image. Lawrence Brown and Eric Moore (1970) modelled residential relocation as stress, search and choice within the city.
• Locational decisions:
  • Harold Hotelling’s (1929) sellers on a beach showed that firms locate in relation to rivals’ decisions, not cost alone.
  • Purchasing power depends on income and behaviour, so demand, and hence the best site, is partly a matter of perception.
  • David M. Smith’s spatial margins of profitability (1966) recognised a zone of profitable sites rather than a single optimum, leaving room for personal choice.
• Agriculture and innovation: farmers change crops on perceived demand and weather, and adopt new seeds in stages.
  • Torsten Hägerstrand’s diffusion studies (1953) showed adoption spreading from early-adopting farmers through personal contact. His later time geography carried the focus on the individual into space-time paths.
• Hazards, planning and voting: risk communication, legible urban design and electoral geography.

Evaluation

Contributions

• It restored the individual to a geography that had reduced people to points, preferences and indifference curves.
• It forced a reappraisal of man–environment relations, exposing the simplicity of both determinism and economic rationality.
• It opened dialogue with other disciplines and revived older themes such as the cultural landscape.
• It helped explode the myth of value-free research and pushed geographers towards policy issues such as hazards and urban planning.

Criticism

• Evolution, not revolution: the expected “behavioural revolution” never came. Kevin Cox (1981) called it “wholly a creature of locational analysis”.
  • Ian Burton (1963) had predicted it would rank beside the quantitative revolution. It did not, because it ran against the spatial Zeitgeist of the time and lacked an integrated body of theory of its own.
• Weak theory: concepts are loosely defined and poorly integrated, findings are not synthesised, and terminology conflicts. Few laws emerged, and models such as Pred’s had limited use.
• Untested assumptions: it is unclear that images can be extracted without distortion, or that image and behaviour match. Little work tested that congruence.
• Animal analogies: borrowing from laboratory psychology invited Arthur Koestler’s jibe of a “ratomorphic” view of man.
• Homo psychologicus: it isolates perception from the economic, social and political structures that constrain choice. Radical geographers saw it as preserving the status quo.
• Bias and scale: work leaned towards urban topics and Western societies, and small student samples were often stretched into policy recommendations.
• Fragile information base: the behavioural environment is only as good as the information behind it. Biased or distorted information yields distorted images, and the approach drifts from the man–environment focus into psychology.
• Observer, not participant: limited knowledge of planning kept behavioural geographers on the sidelines of policy.
• Still positivist: it ignored meaning, emotion and values, the gap that humanistic geography moved to fill.

Decline, Legacy and Revival

• Post-behaviouralism: from the late 1970s, many behavioural themes merged with humanistic and welfare concerns, taking up qualitative, value-sensitive methods and the individual’s lived experience and well-being.
• Attention moved to humanistic, radical and welfare approaches, and behavioural geography became one specialism among many.
• Golledge argued that real advances had come through “process variables”: preferences, attitudes, cognition and cognitive maps. With Robert Stimson (Spatial Behavior, 1987, 1997) he reframed the field as spatial cognition and choice.
• Present-day revival:
  • Wayfinding and navigation research, including Golledge’s own work on navigation aids for blind travellers.
  • GIScience and big data: GPS traces and mobile-phone records now measure activity spaces directly, overcoming the small-sample problem.
  • Behavioural economics (Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler) made bounded rationality mainstream. “Nudge” policies are now used in public health, sanitation and climate action.
  • Risk perception sits at the centre of disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation.
• Its working orientation has endured: inductive generalisation about people and environments, used to plan changes in the stimuli that shape spatial behaviour.
• Behavioural geography’s lasting point remains: spatial patterns are the sum of decisions, and decisions are made on the world as perceived.