Behavioral Geography

Abstract

Behavioral geography encompasses a broad field of human geography that became influential during the 1960s and 1970s. It emerged in reaction to the "quantitative turn" associated with the spatial sciences paradigm of the 1950s and 1960s. A fundamental goal of behavioral geography is to understand how and why people perceive environments in the way they do, and how these perceptions influence actual spatial behavior. Behavioral geography, which was largely responsible for introducing behavioralism to human geography, is best thought of as an approach rather than as a separate subdiscipline, given the breadth of philosophical perspectives, research foci, and methodologies that it fostered. Behavioral approaches in human geography were applied to a range of topics, including natural hazards, urban and rural residents' cognition of their built and natural environments, and people's affective belonging to place. Although segments of the approach were criticized for their, inter alia, positivism, lack of scientific rigor, and failure to challenge the status quo of society, the behavioral approach to human geography facilitated a greater engagement with philosophical and epistemological issues, forged productive interactions and relationships with cognate disciplines, and helped lay the conceptual and methodological groundwork for human geographers to engage with contemporary social, environmental, and political issues of public policy relevance.