Do you prefer to live in a busy city, such as New York, or in a smaller town surrounded by nature? According to the ecological concept of person–environment fit, people have differing opinions on whether they fit better into urban or rural environments. Some individuals prefer to stay and live in big cities, while others prefer quiet suburban areas. I have always preferred to live in large urban centers because they offer better public transportation, career opportunities, and nightlife and entertainment options. However, I cannot deny that a busy city life also brings a significant amount of stress and problems associated with overwhelming crowds, traffic, and noise. Even though city life provides a number of benefits, many studies have suggested that deindividuation, stimulus overload, and bystander effects that occur in city environments can negatively affect individuals’ physical or mental health (Gruman et al., 2017).
A well-known study by Philip Zimbardo (1969) suggested that city environments negatively impact individuals by causing them to become deindividuated (i.e., they lose their sense of personhood). This loss of a sense of self makes people feel less concerned with self-evaluation, responsibility, and self-restraint; furthermore, it increases antisocial behavior. Have you ever noticed that people behave differently in crowds? According to the notion of deindividuation, overwhelming stimulations of city life, such as crowding, lead people to act differently than they would normally act when they are alone (Zimbardo, 1969). For example, a person is likely to follow or mimic the behaviors of a crowd if they are part of a group without reasoning whether the act is right or wrong.
On the other hand, stimulus overload, introduced by Stanly Milgram, provides a psychological explanation for the negative impact of city life on people. Stimulus overload is a state in which our nervous systems are overloaded to the point that we cannot simultaneously react to environmental stimulation, such as crowds, traffic, and noise; thus, we adapt to set priorities and determine where to place more attention (Milgram, 1970). According to Milgram’s theory, city environments cause people to enter a state of stimulus overload, making them devote as little time as possible to obstacles and avoid what is really important in life by leading them to focus on more time-efficiently set priorities. For instance, people living in big cities tend to erect barriers to social interactions, such as withdrawing cash from ATMs, rather than dealing with bank tellers.
Moreover, the bystander effect also explains how our social environments strongly influence individuals’ behaviors. The bystander effect occurs when a large number of people witness an emergency situation in public places and fail to intervene or help others; this commonly occurs in big-city environments (Darley & Latané, 1970). I remember hearing a news report describing an incident in which one person was severely attacked in a public place, but no one in the crowd acted to help the victim. Darley and Latané (1970) explained that the bystander effect occurs in large cities because an individual in a group thinks that he or she will not be blamed for not helping a person who is in danger, since there are almost always many people nearby who might take responsibility for acting in emergency situations.
Although I generally love living in big cities, these previous studies have made me think more carefully about how city environments can negatively affect our behavior to some degree. In addition to the concepts of deindividuation, stimulus overload, and the bystander effect, another study suggests that city living is associated with increased stress and mental illness, such as mood and anxiety disorders and schizophrenia (Yates, 2011). Therefore, further research on the impacts of social environments, specifically on the association between city environments and mental health, is necessary to assess the factors that result in adverse effects on individuals and to find effective intervention strategies for minimizing harm.
References
Darley, J., & Latané, B. (1970). The unresponsive bystander: Why doesn’t he help? New York, NY: Appleton Century Crofts.
Gruman, J., Schneider, F., & Coutts, L. (Eds.) (2017). Applied social psychology. SAGE Publications, Inc, https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781071800591
Milgram, S. (1970). The experience of living in cities. Science, 167, 1461–1468
Yates, D. (2011). The stress of city life. Nat Rev Neurosci 12, 430 https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3079
Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In W. J. Arnold & D. Levine (Eds.), Nebraska symposium on motivation (Vol. 17, pp. 237–307). Lincoln: University of Nebraska