Environmental Psychology: Man and His Physical Setting

The editors argue that environmental psychology's substantive and conceptual boundaries can be defined through the structure of a carefully organized anthology. Rather than presenting a single theoretical framework, the volume's six parts—Theoretical Conceptions and Approaches, Basic Psychological Processes and the Environment, Individual Needs in the Organization of the Environment, Social Institutions and Environmental Design, Environmental Planning, and Methods in Environmental Research—are offered as an operational definition of the field. Each part has its own summary introduction, and the editors state in their preface that the parts together constitute a statement of what environmental psychology is. This editorial method treats the selection and organization of existing research as itself a theoretical act.

Maurice Yeates, reviewing in Geographical Review, found the book offered a penetrating insight into an exciting area of research and largely avoided the dangers inherent in interdisciplinary anthology projects. He judged Parts Two through Five to be the volume's strength, particularly Part Two's selection of readings demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between environmental and other branches of psychology, and Part Three's treatment of territoriality, privacy, proxemics, and crowding as valuable introduction and source of hypotheses. However, he found Part One loosely articulated and Part Six (Methods) confusing, presenting neither cookbook nor manual nor research design guide, and identified the treatment of the environmental component as the volume's major weakness—too much emphasis on the psychological component and on micro-scale environmental situations.

Part Two, Basic Psychological Processes and the Environment, makes a programmatic claim that Yeates highlighted as one of the volume's vital contributions: the relationship between environmental and other branches of psychology will be symbiotic, and the relatively naive approaches to the environment that were once expedient can no longer be tolerated. Crucially, the editors argue this does not imply abandoning the laboratory as an environmental context. Instead, the environment must be conceptualized and treated in multiple complementary ways—behavior must be studied in situ, via simulation, anecdotally, and in the laboratory. This methodological pluralism rejects the either/or framing of laboratory rigor versus ecological validity that structured much methodological debate in the period.

The first edition was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1970 as a 690-page hardcover edited by Proshansky, Ittelson, and Rivlin. A second edition, retitled Environmental Psychology: People and Their Physical Settings, appeared in 1976 at 632 pages with the same three editors. The title change—from 'Man and His Physical Setting' to 'People and Their Physical Settings'—reflects the broader shift in scholarly terminology during the 1970s away from the generic masculine. The 1976 edition retains the six-part structure with updated selections, and some catalog records identify it as a revised version of the original rather than a wholly new work.

Part Three, Individual Needs in the Organization of the Environment, assembles papers on territoriality, privacy, proxemics, and crowding. Yeates noted that although these space-behavior concepts risk misuse when loosely connected, geographers would find the section serves as both valuable introduction to the literature and source of hypotheses. These four concepts became foundational vocabulary for environmental psychology's engagement with built environments: territoriality from Altman's work on personal space boundaries, privacy as a regulatory mechanism rather than mere withdrawal, proxemics from Hall's interpersonal distance research, and crowding as a psychological experience distinct from mere density. Part Four, Social Institutions and Environmental Design, extends these concepts to spatial behavior in settings like hospitals.

The volume contains no single authored narrative. It presents 65 previously published papers organized into parts, with the editors' contributions confined to a general introduction and six section introductions. The claim embedded in this format is that environmental psychology's identity is best demonstrated through its actual research literature rather than through didactic exposition. Ittelson, Proshansky, Rivlin, and Winkel published the textbook version separately in 1974 as An Introduction to Environmental Psychology with Holt, Rinehart and Winston. The anthology and the textbook were thus companion projects: one showing the field's raw materials, the other providing the coherent synthesis.