Behavior Settings - Ecological Units

Ecological Units

"Ecological units" exist at the interface between the ecological environment and certain practice of molar behavior. These units exist in the physiological, social, psychological, and behavioral realms and share three common attributes:

• they are self-generated, as opposed to resulting from the observer’s or researchers interest or manipulation;
• they have a time-space locus; and
• they have a boundary separating the internal pattern of the unit from the external pattern of surround.

An ecological unit is a composite of an 'environment piece' and a 'behavior piece'. They are hybrid artifacts that exist as quasi-objective entities, much like Searle’s "observer-relative features of the world" (Searle, 1995). An example that Barker (1968) uses (p.11) is a road—a road is a track (physical feature) used for travelling or carrying goods (expression of 'molar behavior'). The coupling of a molar behavior to an environmental feature (affordance) is the mechanism through which the reciprocal relations between different levels of nested or related phenomena occur. The ecological unit is the foundation for the concept of a 'behavior setting' which was defined above. More generally, it seems that this notion captures the relationship of any organism to its niche and is captured by Reed (1996) in his discussion of the 'affordance'.

Barker also develops a useful analogy for conceptualizing this relation, as well as preparing readers for later claims about behavior settings. He observes that 'molar behavior' is to the 'ecological environment', just as 'visual perception' is to 'light'; i.e. in order to understand visual perception, you have to understand light, independent from visual perception. If we were only to look at the eye-optic channel at the instant that light hit the receptor surface, we would know nothing of depth of field, focus, or perspective.

The behavior setting concept could be very useful in the field of architectural programming, architectural design, as well as in urban planning and design. It is the very challenge for behavior setting theory today to be used in those fields: architects and behavioral scientists still are not in full contact in design and research issues. The kind of ecological unity devised by Roger Barker connects strongly and consistently behavior and physical features of ordinary - and those not-so-ordinary settings in universities, labs, hospitals, etc.