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Behaviour Settings

Chapter · July 2016

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Jan Golembiewski
Bilkent University
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Card Title: Affordances

What: Affordances are the choices that are presented to us by people or by the
environment.

How: Good environments are like nice people. They politely offer things,
opportunities and therefore allow choice.

Why: The opportunity to resist an offering is an important neural exercise: an act of
self-definition (the distinctly human business of identity building). Acceptance may
also be a nice indulgence. Experience without positive affordances is humdrum and
can even become psycho-toxic.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DESIGN 1

METHOD OWNER: Jan Golembiewski
FACULTY: Design/health
CARD NUMBER:
CARD NAME: Affordances

Affordances are choices that are presented to us by
people or by the environment. Affordances modify and
direct people’s behaviour by activating self-agency – by
allowing choice. In contrast, most other ways to modify
behaviour are through rules or physical barriers like
walls or fences.

Affordances are offerings. People don’t always respond
to them in the same way. Objects can be used (or
reacted to) in limitless ways, but responses are reduced
by the limits of the imagination, abilities etc.

The opportunity to resist an offering is an important neural exercise: an act of self-
definition (the distinctly human business of identity building). Acceptance of a
wholesome affordance is also good. And even a slightly negative one (chocolate?)
may an occasional and welcome indulgence. Experience without positive affordances
is humdrum and sometimes even becomes a danger for mental health.

There are many affordance types – emotional, hedonic, physical, ones that reinforce
a sense of self, and others that suggest narratives. Any of these of these can be
either good or bad. All are relevant to the dynamics of a place, and can be designed
using a stage-set design approach. Some positive and wholesome affordances
include the following:

Privacy affords good social relations. People get along best when they aren’t forced
into one another’s faces, nor separated by vast spaces.

Activated outdoor spaces of different types, affords variation of experience. Things
to think about include:
• Beauty and aromas to stimulate aesthetic sensibilities;
• A challenging but rewarding environment;
• Diversity to stimulate interest and connection with nature and with others;
• Ceremonial activities to gather people and create a sense of community;
• Things that can be manipulated and altered;
• Things to buy or activities to do;
• Spaces for people and animals to play

Aesthetics are important because they provide us with the intellectual choices about
whether to like or dislike something for no other reason than to define one’s sense
of self. It’s fun to agree with friends about aesthetics but disagreeing is an important
identity-building opportunity also.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DESIGN 2


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Card Title: Behaviour settings

What: Behaviour settings are environments that embody predetermined uses.

How: Behaviour settings limit choices, but suggest and even enable specific actions:
a church suggests prayer and contemplation; a library is for quiet reading; a football
field for ball-play, etc.

Why: Rows of books don’t stop people playing music and dancing (a flashmob, for
instance), but creativity is needed to perceive alternative choices and courage is
needed to defy the expectations of the behaviour setting.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DESIGN 3

METHOD OWNER: Jan Golembiewski
FACULTY: Design/health
CARD NUMBER:
CARD NAME: Behaviour settings

Behaviour settings were first described in 1954 (Barker and Wright) but the idea was
only adapted as design theory in 1972 (Proshansky et al.). The theory describes how
recognisable physical settings constrain behaviour to predetermined uses. This
occurs through an unconscious neural process called inhibition. Behaviour settings
cause people to tone down their voices when they enter a church or a temple and
other predictable behaviours in other spaces (unless they’re children or for some
other reason have never learned the appropriate behavioural associations).

Neural inhibition prevents actions from occurring whenever an opportunity (an
affordance) presents. Unless people are drunk, on drugs or suffer a mental
pathology of some kind, they will automatically assess the context, and will act
within the restrictions imposed by the context unless they wilfully choose to be
deliberately creative and defiant. This creative impulse is enabled by another factor:
a sense of safety and of happiness.

People’s choices are part of a complex neural process that reflect the dynamics of
behaviour settings, neural inhibition and affordances. All of these factors are greatly
affected by our emotional assessments about the environmental circumstances at
the time (Golembiewski, 2013). As you can see from the following diagram,
‘negative’ perceptions limit the choices we can perceive, whereas happiness expands
the creative potential:

Automatic limbic processes Affective / hedonic pre-judgement
1a. Narrative/affective monitoring – +

Automatic (mesostriatal) processes Creative (frontal) reprocessing

1b. Latent restrictions from
behaviour settings (inhibition) 2. Expanding possibilities of
behaviour settings (excitation)
Behaviour limits
3. Opportunities of
Affordances (excitation) 4. Choice to react against
– affordances (inhibition)
}}

5. Potential range of final action

(mediated by the striatum)

Barker, Rodger Garlock and Wright, Herbert F (1954), The Midwest and its Children;
the Psychological Ecology of an American Town (Evanston: Row, Peterson & Co).
Golembiewski, J. (2013). Determinism and desire: Some neurological processes in
perceiving the design object. International Journal of Design in Society, 6(3), 23-36.
Proshansky, H.M., Ittelson, W.H., and Rivlin, LG (1972), 'Freedom of Choice and
Behavior in a Physical Setting', Environment and the Social Sciences, 29-34.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DESIGN 4



IMAGE:

Card Title: Salutogenics

What: Salutogenics is a theory of health that understands disease as a failure to cope
with constant demands and defend oneself against the entropic forces of life.

How: Whereas the entropic forces that drag us toward disease and death are
ubiquitous and generalised, the resources we use to keep us healthy and maintain
wellbeing are specific and can be structured as experience design: they are
manageability, comprehensibility or meaningfulness.

Why: Manageability is about basic functional needs: money, food, shelter.
Comprehensibility about negotiating circumstances to make the most of them:
societies rules and patterns. Meaningfulness is about why you’d bother. What is it
you live for? What is it you’d die for?

PSYCHOLOGICAL DESIGN 5

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