Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Transferability Factor

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. | February 29th, 2016

People are complicated. There are so many factors that influence how they’ll respond to any situation, and so quantified predictions of their behavior are unlikely to be accurate. There is a continuing parade of new influences on people’s thoughts and behaviors that cognitive scientists need to recognize when making projections. After people’s responses to environmental changes are quantified, it’s unlikely that whatever differences in productivity or whatever else was found in that first measured setting will be precisely replicated in a second. Here, we’re not talking about things like more energy efficient light bulbs that save x or y or z% on energy bills after humans decide to use them. We’re talking about assessments of things such as new workplace configurations that people toil in and where their rate of effective collaboration changes by c%. These are situations in which differences measured are deeply tied to human brains, not metal …