Building better than we know: The residential built environment, trust, social behaviour, biology, and health

Over the last decade there has been a renewed interest in identifying exactly how aspects of the residential built environment “get under the skin” and affect the physical health of not only of those who dwell within, but reside and commute among, disorderly and deteriorating neighbourhoods. This thesis is focused on better understanding how aspects of the social environment are crystallised in the residential built environment, and in particular the proximate environmental, behavioural, and perceptual mechanisms that account for how our interaction with the residential built environment modulates both our social behaviour and physical health. Building on Wilson and O’Brien’s evolutionary construct of Community Perception, Chapter 1 reviews the relevant literature from across the evolutionary human sciences, social psychology, applied social epidemiology, and social neuroscience to propose a biologically plausible pathway from the residential built environment to physical health. The empirical chapters (Chapters 2 to 4), then test this framework through both experimental and observational studies. Employing an eye tracking paradigm, in Chapter 2 we learn about the perceptual mechanisms that account for how residential maintenance has a significant impact on our assessment of the social environment. In Chapter 3 we find no significant difference in social behaviour, assayed through a behavioural economics paradigm, following affective priming via different levels of residential maintenance. A result which could be a consequence of methodological factors, or a finding due to the absence of task-specific relevance of the maintenance cue in a socially neutral experimental framing. In Chapter 4, through an analysis of the UK Household Longitudinal Study biomarker data asset, we find that residential maintenance is significantly associated with poor physical health. Chapter 5 then assesses the validity of the thesis’s proposed framework, the thesis’s contribution to the burgeoning field of inquiry, and considers future work towards generating impactful evidence-based public policy proposals.