Seminar 2008
Why do we leave it so late? Reactions to environmental disasters and the rules of place.
Professor David Canter
The challenge of environmental threats, as varied as global warming and ecological degradation are usually discussed in economic, political or loosely social terms, but the central problem is psychological. We organise our lives to maintain our current pattern of behaviour. This is fundamental to how we deal with the world because it draws on how we see ourselves and the narratives that structure our transactions with others. These 'rules of place' can be seen in how people deal with small scale emergencies like buildings on fire as well as large scale disasters. There will be no profound change in how we interact with our environment until we address directly changes in the rules of place.
David Canter is Professor of Psychology at the University of Liverpool where he directs the Centre for Investigative Psychology. Although most widely known for his development of investigative psychology out of explorations in psychological offender profiling, described in his award-winning book Criminal Shadows and his more recent book Mapping Murder, David is also internationally known as one of the founders of environmental psychology that grew out of his early work in architectectural psychology. He established the major journal in the field and published The Psychology of Place as a definitive text. He has carried out many studies of human behaviour in emergencies, including current work on the evacuation of the World Trade Centre on 9/11.
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