Decisions in Context: Toward an Integrative Behavioral Geography

Although several geographers have lamented the effective demise of behavioral geography as a subdiscipline, advances within geography and across the behavioral sciences have created new opportunities for its renewal. This article revisits theoretical debates that shaped the emergence and subsequent decline of behavioral geography and argues that advances in research on cognition, sociality, and institutional decision-making have since addressed many critiques of the field. Building on this foundation, I propose a broader, more integrative conception of behavioral geography as the study of how decisions emerge from interactions among cognitive, social, and institutional processes operating within behaviorally meaningful contexts. Rather than defining behavioral geography through specific domains or methods, I argue that a new and reinvigorated behavioral geography is better understood as an analytical orientation that offers a uniquely integrative approach to the study of decision-making, equally emphasizing both cognition and context. Given geography’s long-standing contributions to these areas, the discipline is well positioned to make distinctive interdisciplinary contributions to contemporary behavioral research and to further integrate behavioral theory with geographic scholarship.