Roger Garlock Barker (1903 – 1990) was a social scientist, a founder of environmental psychology, and a leading figure in the field for decades.
Barker earned his PhD from Stanford University, where his advisor was Walter Richard Miles.
In the 1940s, Barker and his associate, Herbert Wright from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, set up the Midwest Psychological Field Station in the nearby town of Oskaloosa, Kansas, a town of fewer than 2,000 people.
Based on this data, Barker first developed the concept of the behavior setting to help explain the interplay between the individual and the immediate environment.
One of his work's most valuable developments was examining how the number and variety of behavior settings remain remarkably constant even as institutions increase in size.