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Exploring the Social Import of Affordance Perception
Project Funding: SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 2025-2027
This project emerged out of the Ecological Psychology in Society Think Tank project.
This research seeks to develop a novel framework for understanding collective behaviours and social coordination by synthesizing the Bourdieusean notion of habitus, our shared dispositions to behave in habitual ways in social contexts, with J.J. Gibson’s analysis of affordance perception, the psychological mechanism allowing us to see what actions are possible for us in a given environment. Building such a theory of social affordances offers to not only contribute to empirical research in environmental sustainability and social cognition, but also to lend insight into philosophical debates on collective intentionality, normative cognition, selfhood, and group agency.
It may also have some important practical import. It is imperative to better understand the social structures, organizations and practices that promote (and those that hinder) cooperation and collective action. Such understanding can inform our approaches to problems requiring the input and participation of large and diverse populations, including climate change and sustainability, and may help more effectively urge people to adopt more sustainable habits (in transportation choices, for instance). We hope our theoretical contributions will help us make progress on such questions as: What is it that makes good solutions to shared problems more apparent? How can we design the rules and spaces for interaction so that they favor collective deliberation and engagement over stubborn inflexibility or reflexive self-protection? How do we identify and avoid situations which obscure productive pathways forward? The effort aligns with the global challenge of envisioning better governance systems able to tackle wicked problems involving social coordination and the adoption of new and better habits.
In this, we are inspired by the ways in which a better understanding of affordances enhanced the field of design. Knowing what forms afford pushing vs. pulling is a crucial consideration in making door handles, as anyone who has tried (and maybe failed) to enter a building can attest. Similarly, the visual design of airport runways has prevented many accidents by making it clear when a pilot is meant to steer left rather than right upon landing her plane (especially so when the action runs counter to the natural, ingrained tendency to turn toward the terminal). And of course, the interface design of the iPhone has been rightly heralded for the way it made manifest the actions (pushing, swiping, pinching and tilting) that would elicit the desired outcomes from the device. Our hope is to eventually translate these lessons into the design of shared environments.
Primary Investigator
- Michael Anderson, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Humanities
Co-applicant:
- Scott Schaffer, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences
Trainees:
- Varun Ravikumar, PhD Student, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Humanities