Speaker
Description
In 1980, Gordon Orians suggested that all humans have an innate positive emotional response to savanna landscapes. The reasoning was that the savanna was the most beneficial biome for our survival in our evolutionary past. This idea was henceforth referred to as the "savanna hypothesis". The savanna hypothesis was tested in 1982 by John Balling and John Falk with images from six different terrestrial biomes, and they concluded that children have a preference for the savanna biome, while adults prefer the environment that they are most familiar with (Balling and Falk, 1992). The savanna hypothesis was also tested by Robert Sommer and Joshua Summit in 1995 and 1999, this time with line drawings of trees instead of landscape photos. They determined that the acacia form, found in the African savanna, was the most preferred tree form (Sommer and Summit, 1995; Summit and Sommer, 1999). These experiments have now been repeated in an online format, with 200 German-speaking adult participants, to investigate whether the savanna hypothesis can be validated in a larger sample. Participants submitted rankings and ratings of images from five terrestrial biomes (savanna, desert, rainforest, coniferous forest, deciduous forest) and additionally a "park" biome, as well as rankings and ratings of line drawings of different tree shapes. Preliminary results will be presented and discussed within the larger context of environmental preferences.
