Mobility Behaviors and Physical Environments

Mobility describes the way a person interacts with their environment in terms of how they move through space over time. We study individual differences in people's mobility patterns (e.g., distance travelled, routines, time spent in different locations) using surveys, experience sampling, and GPS data. Our work in this area is focused on (a) characterizing mobility behaviors and the environments people spend time in, (b) identifying the demographic and psychological factors associated with different mobility patterns, and (c) understanding the short and long-term outcomes of engaging in certain mobility behaviors or spending time in certain environments for people’s physical and mental well-being.

Below are representative publications about this topic: 

• Matz, S. C., & Harari, G. M. (2021). Personality–place transactions: Mapping the relationships between Big Five personality traits, states, and daily places. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(5), 1367.
• Müller, S. R., Peters, H., Matz, S. C., Wang, W., & Harari, G. M. (2020). Investigating the Relationships between Mobility Behaviours and Indicators of Subjective Well–Being Using Smartphone–Based Experience Sampling and GPS Tracking. European Journal of Personality, 34(5), 714-732.
• Harari, G. M., Müller, S. R., & Gosling, S. D. (2020). 19 Naturalistic Assessment of Situations Using Mobile Sensing Methods. The Oxford handbook of psychological situations, 299.
• Müller, S. R., Harari, G. M., Mehrotra, A., Matz, S., Khambatta, P., Musolesi, M., ... & Rentfrow, P. J. (2017, September). Using human raters to characterize the psychological characteristics of GPS-based places. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM international joint conference on pervasive and ubiquitous computing and proceedings of the 2017 ACM international symposium on wearable computers (pp. 157-160).