Before her retirement, Rachel was the Samuel T. Dana Professor of Environment and Behavior in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, as well as a Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Over a span of more than 50 years, Rachel has written widely on the role the environment plays in helping people become more reasonable, effective, and psychologically healthy. With Stephen Kaplan, she co-authored Humanscape: Environments for People, Cognition and Environment: Functioning in an Uncertain World; and The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. Robert L. Ryan joined them as co-author of With People in Mind: Design and Management of Everyday Nature. Rachel and Avik Basu co-edited Fostering Reasonableness: Supportive environments for bringing out our best. When it was published (2015) we dubbed it “the RPM book.” More recently, the Reasonable Person Model (RPM) has been renamed Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) to emphasize the centrality of the environment (broadly conceptualized) in understanding and affecting behavior.
Rachel Kaplan PhD
Professor (Emerita) of Environment and Behavior
School for Environment and Sustainability
University of Michigan
Areas of Expertise
Publications
Kaplan, S. & Kaplan, R. (Eds.) (1978). Humanscape: Environments for people. Belmont, CA: Duxbury. Republished by Ann Arbor, MI: Ulrich’s 1982. https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/148515
Kaplan, S. & Kaplan, R. (1982). Cognition and environment: Functioning in an uncertain world. New York: Praeger. Republished by Ann Arbor, MI: Ulrich’s 1989.
R. Kaplan and S. Kaplan (1989) The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kaplan, R. (1995). Informational issues: A perspective on human needs and inclinations. In G. A. Bradley (Ed.). Urban Forest Landscapes: Integrating Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives (pp. 60-71). Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Kaplan, R. (1996). The small experiment: Achieving more with less. In J. L. Nasar & B. B. Brown (Eds.). Public and Private Places (pp. 170-174). Edmond, OK: Environmental Design Research Association. https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/148479
Kaplan, R., Kaplan, S., & Ryan, R. L. (1998). With people in mind: Design and management of everyday nature. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Kaplan, R. (2001). The nature of the view from home: Psychological benefits. Environment and Behavior, 33, 507-542. https://doi.org/10.1177/00139160121973115
Ryan, R. L., Kaplan, R., & Grese, R. E. (2001). Predicting volunteer commitment in environmental stewardship programs. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 44(5), 629-648. DOI: 10.1080/09640560120079948
Kaplan, S. & Kaplan, R. (2003). Health, supportive environments, and the reasonable person model. American Journal of Public Health, 93 (9), 1484-1489. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.93.9.1484
Matsuoka, R. H. & Kaplan, R. (2008). People needs in the urban landscape: Analysis of Landscape and Urban Planning contributions. Landscape and Urban Planning, 84(1), 7-19. DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2007.09.009
Kaplan, S. & Kaplan, R. (2009). Creating a larger role for environmental psychology: The Reasonable Person Model as an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 29(3), 329-339. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2008.10.005
Kaplan, R. (2011). Intrinsic and aesthetic values of urban nature: A psychological perspective. In I. Douglas, D. Goode, M. Houk, & R. Wang (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology. London: Routledge. (Pp. 385-393.)
Kaplan, R. (2011). Wetlands from a psychological perspective: Acknowledging and benefiting from multiple realities. In B. A. LePage (Ed.) Wetlands: Integrating multidisciplinary concepts. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer Science. (Pp. 155-170.) DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-0551-7_9
Kaplan, R. & Kaplan, S. (2011). Well-being, reasonableness, and the natural environment. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 3(3), 304-321. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-0854.2011.01055.x
Basu, A., Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (2014). Creating supportive environments to foster reasonableness and achieve sustainable well-being. In T. J. Hämäläinen and J. Michaelson (Eds.) Well-being and beyond: Broadening the public and policy discourse. (Pp. 182-217) Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, New Horizons in Management Series. https://redirect.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Basu-Kaplan-Kaplan-2014-In-Well-Being-and-Beyond.pdf
Duvall, J. & Kaplan, R. (2015). Examining the effects of group-based nature outings on veterans through the lens of the Reasonable Person Model. In D. Dustin, K. Bricker, S. Negley, M. Brownlee, K. Schwab & N. Lundberg (Eds.) This Land Is Your Land: Toward a Better Understanding of Nature’s Resiliency-Building and Restorative Power for Armed Forces Personnel, Veterans, and Their Families (Pp. 93-102). Urbana, IL: Sagamore Publishing.
Basu, A. & Kaplan, R. (2015). The Reasonable Person Model (RPM): Introducing the framework and the chapters. In A. Basu & R. Kaplan (Eds.) Fostering reasonableness: Supportive environments for bringing out our best. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Press. (Pp. 1-20). http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/maize.13545970.0001.001
Kaplan, R. (2015). The joys and struggles of model building. In A. Basu & R. Kaplan (Eds.) Fostering reasonableness: Supportive environments for bringing out our best. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Press. (Pp. 25-42). http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/maize.13545970.0001.001
Kaplan, R. & Basu, A. (2015). Fostering our common humanity. In A. Basu & R. Kaplan (Eds.) Fostering reasonableness: Supportive environments for bringing out our best. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Press. (Pp. 392-406). http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/maize.13545970.0001.001
Basu, A., Duvall, J., & Kaplan, R. (2019). Attention restoration theory: Exploring the role of soft fascination and mental bandwidth. Environment and Behavior, 51(9-10), 1055-1081. doi.org/10.1177/0013916518774400