Ecological and Social Psychology - Starting to look back

I have a paper coming out in the next issue of Ecological Psychology. It is an article written for the 50th anniversary of Gibson's The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. The article lays out the foundation of Ecological Psychology, as I see it, the core insights of the field connected to Gibson's prescient insight regarding what an evolutionary theory of perception must look like. This logic was most well developed in the 1966 book, and because Gibson was not keen on repeating himself, those ideas were not drawn out to nearly the same extent in his later works. Finalizing that article has me thinking again about the relationship between ecological and social psychology.


A decade ago I started a dialog in Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science about the relationship between Ecological Psychology and Social Psychology. It started as my first formal foray into connecting the work of E. B. Holt and J. J. Gibson, and ended up with three articles written by myself, three official comments, and a several articles (both in IPBS and in other venues) that referenced the discussion. My first article was very broad, but the replies focused the exchange on the more radical possibilities of an ecological-social psychology. The start of it al, the lead in for the first paper, was Holt's marvelous metaphor between a coral reef and the peril's of psychological reductionism (especially "bead-theory" approaches to psychology):