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Ecological Psychology in Society
2024-2025
Ecological Psychology (EP) is an influential alternative approach to mainstream cognitive science for understanding mind and behavior. While classical approaches focus on what is inside the head, EP instead focuses on what the head is inside of and examines the meaningful action possibilities or affordances that an environment offers to animals for navigating their surroundings.
While this concept has been productively used in fields such as neuroscience and robotics, its utility in the social sciences to study complex cognitive-social phenomena such as social cognition, social interactions, and collective behavior has been relatively underexplored. For instance, what meaningful action possibilities do humans afford each other during intersubjective encounters, from romantic relationships and team sports to instances of conflict and racism? How do members from different social groups see, think, and act together in rapidly evolving social environments? Do such environments offer different affordances to members from various social groups, such as immigrants and Indigenous Peoples?
This project uses empirical findings and conceptual resources from sociology, ecological psychology, and philosophy to build a theory of social affordances for studying human social behaviors in the contemporary social world. The project contributes to empirical research in social cognition and interaction and lends insight into philosophical debates on collective intentionality and social ontology.
Faculty Members:
- Mike Anderson, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Humanities
- Scott Schaffer, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences
Trainees:
- Varun Ravikumar, PhD Student, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Humanities
- Eysan Demirkaya, PhD Student, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Humanities
- Priscila Ribeiro Prado Barros, PhD Student, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences
- Successful SSHRC IDG application: “Exploring the social import of affordance perception”
- Hosted Spring 2025 Workshop, “Cognition in Social Contexts: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”