Behavioral Geography

Behavioral geography investigates human action in geographic space as mediated through the cognitive processing of environmental information. Its emphasis is on spatial behavior and the psychology that lies beneath it at an individual level. Behavioral geography deals with the environment defined by human behavior, with people central and integral to every problem. Its major focus has been on the relations between a multidimensional environment and the multifaceted process of human action, mediated through perception and cognition as active processes of learning about places, with the mind mediating between the environment and behavior in it.

Behavioral geography grew as a reaction to the absence of individual action in the models of spatial science that arose from the quantitative revolution in geography during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Researchers became dissatisfied with the mechanistic and deterministic nature of quantitative models of human behavior that focused on so-called “rational economic man.” Some of the early assumptions of spatial analysis, that individuals were both entirely rational and optimizers in their spatial actions, were too simplistic. Randomness was introduced to empirical studies, soon to be followed by a set of cognitive variables that led to common ground with psychology. Behavioral geography seeks to understand the geographic world through the windows of individuals—their thoughts, knowledge, and decisions—aiming to provide an insight into human spatial processes by studying the processes themselves. In this manner, behavioral geography attempts to comprehend reasons for overt spatial behavior by incorporating behavioral variables and through understanding the ways in which humans come to know the geographic world in which they live.

The environment in which spatial behavior takes place—the myriad of decision-making processes that are undertaken each day to travel, to work, to shop, and so on—is far too complex to be incorporated into a computational model using individual normative rational beings. This would involve mapping at a scale of nearly one to one. As a result, aggregate models of spatial behavior were developed. Alternative models of aggregate behavior developed within behavioral geography, built on the concepts of satisfier rather than optimizer. Within behavioral geography, there is interest in the environment beyond the physical, economic, social, political, and legal, and this is expanded to include the cognitive, perceptual, ideological, philosophical, and sociological. The focus is at a more micro level and is process based, and generalizations are based on behavioral responses rather than arbitrary criteria such as location, demographics, and socioeconomic indexes.