If You Want to Know Who You Are, Tell Me Where You Are: The Importance of Places

Abstract

As we manoeuvre through life we often try to predict other people’s behaviors and feelings; sometimes even our own. A classical take on the matter is to refer to character traits. But there is another source of information we may tap for our predictions – highly relevant and still often overlooked: knowledge of where the person is. At what place? In which context?

This article invites you on a journey of thinking about and exploring the marvellous impacts of places. We will start by visiting personality psychology, attending the quest of its professionals for ever-better behavior predictions. Subsequently, we will witness an experiment on the importance of places – seeing how a place setup may propel forcefully, almost mercilessly towards innovations. We will then browse personality psychology and other fields in search of fast and easy ways to make sense of places: How are they going to affect us? Who are we going to be there? Finally, we will draw together what we have found and construct a scheme to analyze or design places – which, of course, needs to be put to the test…