Towards cross-cultural environmental psychology: A state-of-the-art review and recommendations

Abstract

Environmental psychology is a field concerned with transactions between humans and their environments. Since human–environment interactions are culture-bound, a fuller understanding of such interactions requires sensitivity to the role of culture in the ways researchers theorize human behavior, conduct empirical studies, and interpret observed findings. In this article, we aim to advance the development of a culturally informed understanding of human–environment interactions, which we refer to as cross-cultural environmental psychology. We first discuss why a cultural perspective is useful. We then survey the field of environmental psychology as indexed by publications in this journal with a complementary set of three bibliometric analyses, which show that the field lacks cultural diversity in both its research participants and its authors, and it is in need of more cross-border, particularly cross-continent, collaborations. We offer a summary of previous cross-cultural studies in terms of how the influence of culture was conceptualized and how cross-cultural data was collected. We also provide resources and recommendations to environmental psychology researchers who are interested in conducting cross-cultural studies. We conclude the article with an illustration of the important principles and recommendations with reference to the articles in this special issue.